Precarious Passages

Abstract

Precarious Passages investigates how one type of cultural production, fiction written in English, participates in the ongoing construction of black diasporic identity within the old Anglophone African diaspora in the Western world. Because the dispersed communities of the African diaspora are not united around any shared religion, secular culture in its various forms plays a major role in producing and reproducing the African diasporic imaginary—that is, in creating symbolic communities and in keeping alive the sense that there is something that can be called a black diasporic community and something that can be called a black diasporic identity, however nonprescriptively defined. Precarious Passages analyzes eleven novels of movement and migration written by eight contemporary novelists of African or African Caribbean descent (Charles Johnson, Lawrence Hill, Toni Morrison, George Lamming, Caryl Phillips, Andrea Levy, Cecil Foster, and Edwidge Danticat), reading these texts as cultural mediators of black diasporic memory and as active participants in the formation of black diasporic identity. In the process, Precarious Passages advances our understanding of current black Anglophone diasporic fiction by placing novels usually classified as “African American,” “black Canadian,” “black British,” or “postcolonial African Caribbean” in dialogue with each other. Works falling into these categories are traditionally read, interpreted, and anthologized separately, but Precarious Passages shows that the concept and empirical reality of the African diaspora facilitates an integrative approach to the black Atlantic literary imagination.