Diaspora by Bus: Reginald McKnight, Postmodernism, and Transatlantic Subjectivity

Abstract

In the 1980s, Evan Norris, the narrator of Reginald McKnight's novel I Get on the Bus (1990), crosses the Atlantic from America Africa under the sway of political currents that propelled a critical strain of diasporic theory in the twentieth century. Influenced in part by his girlfriend Wanda, his moral touchstone, Evan hopes that this transatlantic voyage will counter European designs to keep the black diaspora from ever coming home reclaim the power of familyhood (165). Wanda employs familial rhetoric encode a heroic pursuit of racial solidarity around the globe. No less alluring is this ideology's promise reinvent Evan's identity by positioning him within a seamless continuum of kinship and communal belonging. Through its reinvention of the individual subject and the collective consciousness of the diaspora, this paradigm powerfully challenges European hegemony. Wanda's labor politicize Evan's identity evokes the concern with literal and symbolic returns Africa that has become a sine qua non in the thought of diasporic activists and aesthetes. While black Atlantic discourse, broadly construed, has undoubtedly been characterized by disparate, competing agendas, redemptive homecoming has been reproduced across social divides in a way that warrants framing it as an ideological dominant within transatlantic modernity. Stuart Hall evocatively refers traditional returns as a oneness that provides a people with stable unchanging and continuous frames of reference and meaning, beneath the shifting divisions and vicissitudes of actual history (Cultural Identity 393).