Of belonging and becoming: Black atlantic (Inter‐)cultural memory in the early autobiographies of Peter Abrahams and Es'kia Mphahlele

Abstract

Peter Abrahams was a major New African intellectual of the New African Movement. The New African Movement was a particular historical eventuation consisting of intellectuals, writers, musicians, political leaders and religious figures who – between the years 1904 and 1960 – constructed a singular form of modernity in South Africa known as “New African modernity.” One of the strongest outside forces influencing the construction of New African modernity was New Negro modernity in the United States. A singular achievement of Peter Abrahams was to have imported to South Africa the literary modernism of the Harlem Renaissance. This was done through his novels, short stories and poems. When he went into exile in 1939 at the age of twenty, he navigated black cosmopolitanism through the philosophy of Pan‐Africanism, which was the quintessential ideology of black modernism across the first half of the twentieth century.