Black Atlantic Research Articles

Migration and Multiplicity of Belonging in Caryl Phillips

The themes of identity, belonging and its reverse, exclusion, have always been central to Caryl Phillips’ works of non-fiction and fiction. In particular, some essays published in two collections, A New World Order (2001) and Colour Me English (2011), and the novel A Distant Shore (2003) investigate to which extent refugees and immigrants are redesigning a new order in the modern globalised world and new notions of belonging and identification based on cultural plurality. In my article I will show the evolution of Phillips’ view on these topics in the first decade of the new millennium, with particular refer- ence to the above-mentioned texts. DOI: 10.17456/SIMPLE-96 Bibliography Ashcroft, Bill. 2010a. Transnation. Janet Wilson, Cristina Sandru & Sarah Lawson Welsh eds. Rerouting the Postcolonial. New Directions for the New Millennium . London-New York: Routledge, 72-85. Ashcroft, Bill. 2010b. Globalization, Transnation and Utopia. W. Goebel & S. Schabio eds. Locatin g Transnational Ideals . New York: Routledge, 13-19. Ashcroft, Bill, 2017. Transnation and the Postcolonial City. Australian Humanities Review , 62 (November): 46-64. Dabydeen, David & Nana Wilson-Tagoe. 1988. A Reader’s Guide to West Indian and Black British Literature . London: Hansib Publishing. Ellis, David. 2013. “They are us”: Caryl Phillips’ A Distant Shore and the British Transnation. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature , 48, 3: 411-423. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic . London-New York: Verso. Gunning, Dave. 2011. Infrahuman Rights, Silence, and the Possibility of Communication in Recent Narratives of Illegality in Britain. Annalisa Oboe & Shaul Bassi eds. Experiences of Freedom in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures . London & New York: Routledge, 141-150. Hall, Stuart. 1997. Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities. Anthony D. King ed. Culture , Globalisation and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 41-68. McLeod, John. 2008. Diaspora and Utopia: Reading the Recent Work of Paul Gilroy and Caryl Phillips. Mark Shacklenton ed. Diasporic Literature and Theory – Where now? Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2-17. Mellino, Miguel. 2003. L’Atlantico nero, ovvero viaggio nell’anti-anti-essenzialismo di Paul Gilroy. Paul Gilroy. The Black Atlantic: L’identita nera tra modernita e doppia coscienza . Roma: Meltemi, 7-15. Phillips, Caryl. 2001. A New World Order . London: Secker & Warburg. Phillips, Caryl. 2003. A Distant Shore . London: Secker & Warburg. Phillips, Caryl. 2011. Colour Me English . London: Harvill Secker. Sarangi, Jaydeep & Patrycja Austin. 2014. Rethinking Postcolonialis: An Interview with Bill Ashcroft. Studia Anglica Resoviensia 11, 85: 131-137. Ward, Abigail. 2012. An Interview with Caryl Phillips. Contemporary Literature , 53, 4: 628-645. http://www.carylphillips.com/ (consulted on 7/9/2018). 2014 International Festival of Literature “Incroci di Civilta”: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=MqYnsoUs71s (consulted on 7/9/2018).

Sargassum in the Black Atlantic: Entanglement and the abyss in Bearden, Walcott, and Philip

ABSTRACT“Sargassum in the Black Atlantic: Entanglement and the abyss in Bearden, Walcott, and Philip” explores the figure of seaweed, particularly free-floating sargassum, as a model for conceptualizing transoceanic connections in the Black Atlantic. I present sargassum as a replacement for the concept of the rhizome, which fails to adequately function within an aquatic context since as a terrestrial metaphor the rhizome cannot capture the ocean’s fluidity and circulation. Replacing a terrestrial figure with an oceanic one allows for a richer understanding of connection and loss, since the migratory sargassum is able to conceptually entangle disparate cultures, while also attending to the histories, and gaps in histories, contained within the oceanic abyss. It is within this context that the article considers a variety of works, including Romare Bearden’s collage “The Sea Nymph” from the series Black Odyssey, Derek Walcott’s poem “The Bounty,” and M. NourbeSe Philip’s book-length poem Zong!.

“Telling freedom” or “telling the spades back home how to behave”? re-examining Peter Abrahams’s writing in London

This article considers the notable dearth of recent scholarship on Peter Abrahams’s writing in the context of his exile and his complex, shifting ideological self-positioning throughout his career. To attempt to address this lacuna in South African literary criticism, and to partially explain why Abrahams has been under-researched, I look at key moments during his early career, including the publication of Dark Testament (1942), Song of the City (1945) and Return to Goli (1953). By focusing on texts by Abrahams that were published during his time in London, I also wish to address the significance of the city in the history of South African literature, and in African anti-colonial and anti-racist thinking more broadly.Keywords: Peter Abrahams, London, Black Atlantic, transnationalism, anti-colonialism, Pan-Africanism, liberal humanism

Blinded by Bandung?

Research Article| May 01 2018 Blinded by Bandung?: Illumining West Papua, Senegal, and the Black Pacific Quito Swan Quito Swan Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Radical History Review (2018) 2018 (131): 58–81. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-4355133 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation Quito Swan; Blinded by Bandung?: Illumining West Papua, Senegal, and the Black Pacific. Radical History Review 1 May 2018; 2018 (131): 58–81. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-4355133 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsRadical History Review Search Advanced Search This article explores West Papua’s struggle against Indonesian imperialism. Defined as Black for centuries, in the 1960s West Papuan organizers self-identified as Melanesian “Negroids of the Pacific.” Via travel, photographs and literature, they forged Diaspora with the broader Black world. In 1975, they established an office in Senegal, arguing that Melanesia and Africa shared a common destiny. Senegal’s Leopold Senghor facilitated this move as an act of Negritude.West Papuan activists argued that some Africana leaders refused to denounce Indonesia’s colonial violence because they were blinded by the Afro-Asian solidarity of the 1954 Bandung Conference. Indonesia used Bandung to codify its eventual colonization of West Papua. This article complicates Bandung as an iconic symbol of Global South solidarity.Excavating newspapers, indigenous magazines and archives on Melanesia, this article delineates how notions of the Black world have also been blinded by African Diaspora frameworks calibrated to the Black Atlantic. But by illumining Black internationalism in West Papua, it challenges the conceptual and racial invisibility cast over the Black Pacific. West Papua, Senegal, African Diaspora, Bandung, Leopold Senghor The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2018 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.2018 You do not currently have access to this content.

Decolonialidade, Atlântico Negro e intelectuais negros brasileiros: em busca de um diálogo horizontal

Resumo Baseado nas contribuições dos teóricos da decolonialidade e em diálogo com a tradição dos estudos do Atlântico Negro, o artigo, em busca de uma justiça cognitiva, propõe um diálogo horizontal e equitativo entre estas correntes do pensamento político-acadêmico e os intelectuais negros brasileiros. Para o desenvolvimento deste argumento, radicalizamos o compromisso do projeto decolonial com a corpo-geopolítica do conhecimento, bem como propomos uma maior ênfase nas raízes, mais do que nas rotas, dos estudos sobre o Atlântico Negro. Esta afirmação da corpo-geopolítica do conhecimento e das raízes é a chave tanto para a afirmação ontológica e epistemológica das populações negras quanto para construirmos um diálogo pluriversal e transmoderno, no qual as experiências particulares não se percam nem num provincianismo nem num universo abstrato.

Jazz Internationalism: Literary Afro-Modernism and the Cultural Politics of Black Music by John Lowney

Reviewed by: Jazz Internationalism: Literary Afro-Modernism and the Cultural Politics of Black Music by John Lowney J. D. Porter John Lowney. Jazz Internationalism: Literary Afro-Modernism and the Cultural Politics of Black Music. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2017..246 pp. $28.00. Much recent scholarship in global modernism has turned away from explaining the modernist credentials of this or that author from the literary “periphery” and toward explaining the dependence of modernism on the entire world system that produced a periphery in the first place. The idea is that no part can exist without the others; modernism is a function of the whole system of relations. John Lowney adopts a similar approach his latest book, Jazz Internationalism: Literary Afro-Modernism and the Cultural Politics of Black Music. The simplest way to summarize the book is Lowney’s comparatively modest claim that it “reconsiders the significance of jazz for Afro-modernist literature from the New Negro Renaissance through the radical social movements of the 1960s” (4); but en route, he tackles some of the thorniest problems in Afro-modernist and jazz studies today, not least of which is the precise relationship to the “internationalism” that modifies his central topic. In a wide-ranging Introduction that could itself serve as a useful pedagogical tool, Lowney organizes existing scholarship on Afro-modernist internationalism into three broad groups: the “black Atlantic,” the Marxist, and the diasporic. He claims all three models as an influence on this book, and argues convincingly for their compatibility; ultimately, however, they serve as a foundation for his major claim: that jazz has played a major role in both the modernism and the internationalism under examination, whether as a practical medium of cultural exchange or as a more abstract intellectual and aesthetic model. Lowney supplements this overview of the field with a close attention to detail in the historicist mode. This is probably most evident in the first chapter, on Claude McKay. Lowney observes that early reviewers of McKay’s novel Home to Harlem scarcely paid any attention to the fact that a major character is a Haitian immigrant—a trend that persists in critical work on McKay to this day. Lowney draws a parallel with the emergence of the U. S. occupation of Haiti as a cause célèbre for African American intellectuals and activists in the New Negro era, followed by its odd departure from the headlines, even as the occupation continued. These two erasures show the difficulty of attending to the complex, international nature of the African diaspora in the modernist era, and Lowney argues that this is precisely the problem that McKay tries to solve. McKay’s “radical black internationalist social vision” (57) restages primitivist conceptions of global African culture as both the “international vanguard” (37) behind modernist movements like Futurism and Impressionism and the antidote to the modern horrors of life in the Western world. Jazz plays a key role for McKay, not only as a form that can cross cultural and linguistic divides, but also as an intellectual model for a “harmonious mode of collectivity” (56), in opposition to its colonial roots. This is a theme that recurs throughout Lowney’s book, including in the epilogue, which examines the Caribbean/French/American experiences of the characters in Paule Marshall’s The Fisher King. If participation in the jazz world enables these [End Page 337] characters to move to the Parisian metropole, it is the international nature of Afro-modernist culture that helps to make jazz what it is: the Caribbean (and European) influences on both the characters and the music (New Orleans is, after all, something like a Caribbean city, and imbued with French and Latin American musical traditions) are yet another reminder not just that Afro-modernism formed largely in the colonies, but also that modernism in general is contingent on the existence of colonies at all. Lowney is at his best when he turns his attention to the specific forms of jazz and its literatures. He is a careful close reader with an expert eye for minute technical correspondence between literary and musical forms, whether discussing the “explosive imagery and fragmentary lines” (145) of Bob Kaufman’s Charlie...

Review of The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade, by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra et al., & The Brink of Freedom; Improvising life in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World, by David Kazanjian

The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade, by Jorge Canizares-Esguerra et al. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016 The Brink of Freedom; Improvising life in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World , by David Kazanjian. Duke University Press, 2016

Possibilities for African Canadian intellectual history: The case of 19th‐century Upper Canada/Canada West

AbstractAfrican Canadian intellectual history of the 19th century resonates with contemporary movements for racial justice such as Black Lives Matter, and the emergence of new scholars and activists in the vibrant field of Black Canadian Studies. Arguing that Black abolitionists and their ideologies of resistance created an intellectual culture both linked to, and distinct from, intellectual cultures elsewhere in the Atlantic world, the essay discusses new scholarship on histories of ideas, calling for a reexamination of the underground railroad as an important conceptual framework, and surveying recent work on women's intellectual histories, histories of religion, and the culture of science. Interdisciplinary research on the Black press in 19th‐century Canada reveals the importance of African Canadian intellectual history for our understanding of narratives of race, ideologies of emancipation, and the place of Canada in the Black Atlantic.

Amortizing Memory: Debt as Mnemonic Device in Caribbean Canadian Literature

This essay examines the relationship between debt and memory that is emerging in contemporary calls for reparation and Caribbean Canadian literature. CARICOM's and Ta-Nehisi Coates's discussions of reparatory justice, as well as David Chariandy's Soucouyant and Ramabai Espinet's The Swinging Bridge, characterize the black Atlantic's colonial history as an outstanding debt. Collectively, they demonstrate that this past continues to overdetermine the transnational present. This assertion challenges cultural studies' tendency to parse “the colonial,” “the postcolonial,” and “the transnational” as distinct historical phases in a teleologic progression, and exposes the polarization of history and memory, archive and body, that increasingly undergirds diaspora studies' memory-work. Although the concept of “diasporic memory” has scholarly traction, it also places enormous pressure on diasporic bodies to demonstrate specific forms of counter-memory. Rather than supporting this binary or the ethical distinctions it relies on, Chariandy and Espinet underscore embodied memory's fragility and offer an unexpected archival alternative in diasporic characters' financial records.

Oceanic Barriers: The British–American Divide among Revolutionary Black Atlantic Writers

AbstractAs a distinct generation, the first authors of the British black Atlantic – writers of African descent writing in English in the last half of the eighteenth century – bridged differing worlds. The authors shared common experiences, with most having suffered in the slave trade and having celebrated evangelical religious conversions. While scholars have tended to focus on the transoceanic connections of these authors, the political schism between Britain and the United States in the 1780s divided those authors who lived in what became the United States and those who remained within the British Empire. This article explores that division, first by separating the authors into two groups, those labelled American for remaining in the United States, and those called British for residing in the British Isles or imperial possessions at their lives' end. Second, the article explores the different experiences of each group, and the themes or approaches both groups took in their works. Black American writers generally de‐emphasised political issues, forged local patronage connections, and offered a personal piety that minimised the issue of slavery. Black British writers, by contrast, would stress their African or international identity, embraced a piety that was more socially active, and focused more on issues of political rights and antislavery. The contrasts reflect different life experiences of the two groups, in part because they adapted to being governed under different polities. The larger global context of the American Revolution helps account for differences in narrative and experience among this literary generation.

Vagrant Presences: Lost Children, the Black Atlantic, and Northern Britain

Abstract This article discusses a range of African Atlantic figures whose vagrant and vagabond lifestyles help to broaden Paul Gilroy’s conception of the Black Atlantic. Geographically, the author moves away from metropolitan concerns to discuss the rural and the provincial as key areas to discover hidden truths about African Atlantic peoples. The article investigates North British historical concerns from slavery and its aftermath in Scotland to the Cotton Famine in Lancashire. It takes a close look at the radical Scots-descended Robert Wedderburn, the North-of-England-based circus performer Pablo Fanque and the fugitive slave and wanderer James Johnson. It also discusses contemporary artistic responses to black presence in North Britain by Ingrid Pollard and Jade Montserrat to show how these presences are being remembered and reimagined. It uses the theoretical model of multi-dimensional memory, developed by Michael Rothberg, to investigate the way these historical characters and events are key to the fullest understanding of the Black Atlantic in Britain and beyond.

‘His telegrams appear to be hysterical, but he is very astute’: Azikiwe’s spectacular self and the 1945 General Strike in Nigeria

ABSTRACTNationalist Nnamdi Azikiwe won international acclaim through his support of Nigerian workers during the 1945 General Strike, but the important role of Azikiwe’s sophisticated textuality has rarely been acknowledged. Although he was already an accomplished writer and poet, Azikiwe’s success in 1945 is instead vaguely assigned to his charisma and oratory; this refusal to analyse Azikiwe’s textuality leads to the unsatisfactory contention that Azikiwe’s massive support was largely inexplicable. Countering such widespread assumptions, this paper will demonstrate that Azikiwe’s 1945 writing must be understood as the textuality of an elite African writer. Rather than regarding his writings as functional and evidentiary, we must attend to their discursive structure, their stylistic qualities, and their elaboration of a flamboyant authorial persona. In doing so, we will connect Azikiwe’s intervention, often understood purely from the standpoint of labour or political studies, with a growing literature on ‘tin-trunk’ non-elite writers studies of authorial self-fashioning in colonial Africa, and colonial pamphleteering. Ultimately, we will find that questions of personal credibility and cultural references from across the Black Atlantic are critical in Azikiwe’s efforts to secure the trust of his readers.

Aiming for Pensacola: Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers by Matthew J. Clavin

Reviewed by: Aiming for Pensacola: Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers by Matthew J. Clavin Nathaniel Conley (bio) Aiming for Pensacola: Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers. By Matthew J. Clavin. ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Pp. 252. Cloth, $35.00.) Matthew Clavin provides an insightful study of fugitive slaves in Pensacola, Florida, by offering a corrective on the prevailing narrative of the Underground Railroad and situating it within the historiographies of the Atlantic world, the southern frontier, and interracialism. Clavin explores the development of Pensacola from the colonial period through the Civil War, emphasizing the roles of African Americans in the development of a multiracial society on the fringes of the southern frontier. Importantly, [End Page 578] he shows that Pensacola offers an excellent place to study the effects of the Underground Railroad despite the historiographical emphasis that has centered on the Underground Railroad in the Upper South. Clavin argues that, over the course of the nineteenth century, Pensacola became an important destination for fugitive slaves who wished to escape slavery but were too far from traditional routes further north. He shows that Pensacola inhabited a space in the minds of slaves and slaveholders alike with a reputation for being both a "launch and a landing for runaway slaves" (1). Furthermore, although Pensacola was in the Deep South, it was also on the fringes of that society, and slave owner control was weaker there than elsewhere. This weakness allowed the fugitive slave issue to become and remain an issue in Pensacola from the colonial period through the Civil War. Clavin places the expansion of the Underground Railroad and the fugitive slave issue in Pensacola into three historiographical frameworks. First is the Atlantic world, through which he attempts to offer a more cosmopolitan view of a small seaport that illustrates both the nature and role of slavery and just as importantly, slave flight. This framework is especially strong in the first chapter, which explores colonial Pensacola. He shows that, although Pensacola was a backwater relative to its larger neighbors along the Gulf coast, it operated within the Atlantic world, particularly the Black Atlantic. The exposure to the Black Atlantic, in the form of African American sailors, forced "contestation and negotiation" upon the free and enslaved men and women along with their white neighbors (4). By the early nineteenth century, these negotiations and contestations occurred in a city that was being rapidly integrated into the orbit of the American South. Clavin's second historiographic approach, the southern frontier, is interwoven throughout his study, but is especially relevant in his discussions of the War of 1812, the Negro Fort, and the integration of Florida into the United States. He effectively shows that although Pensacola integrated with the United States, it maintained the "multiracial and multinational" characteristics of an Atlantic community due to the dearth of immigration from the United States (66). Clavin's treatment of interracialism in Pensacola is perhaps the most engaging area of his study. This third component of his historiography is evident throughout his study, particularly in his discussions of mixed-race worksites, his discussion of the operation of the Underground Railroad in Pensacola and the region surrounding the city, and the Civil [End Page 579] War. Clavin looks at the role of slaves in industry, the use of slaves by the American military, and the mingling of blacks and whites during everyday life. He also examines the importance of interracial cooperation in the functioning of the Underground Railroad and the aiding of fugitive slaves who escaped in and around Pensacola. Clavin convincingly shows that Pensacola inhabited a space in which an "enduring interracial assault on slavery … had always existed on the Southern frontier" (146). His examination of the Civil War in Pensacola emphasizes both the cooperation and tensions bred by interracialism in this region. Clavin does an excellent job of using Pensacola to show the relatively tenuous control that slave owners had, particularly on the edges of the southern frontier. Moreover, his treatment of interracialism is valuable to understanding southern society, slavery, and the fugitive slave issue as it existed in Pensacola and beyond. Perhaps the weakest part of this study is its...

An Algerian in Paris: Habib Benglia's The Emperor Jones

An Algerian in Paris:Habib Benglia's The Emperor Jones Katie N. Johnson (bio) In 1923 the Algerian actor Habib Benglia played an uncanny Emperor Jones for the nation that colonized his own.1 On the stage of Paris's Odéon Theatre, one of France's most esteemed national performance venues, the French-speaking Benglia—a colonized subject—assumed the role of a colonizer (Brutus Jones) in a play that has been central in discussions of racial performativity, empire, and diaspora. This L'Empereur Jones enacted the ambivalence of colonial discourse, to borrow Homi Bhabha's formulation; it cited, distorted, and reconstructed the image of the Emperor.2 Benglia performed the tensions between empire and colonial subject, embodying the spectacle of a failing Emperor, a despotic ruler who is destroyed by the indigenous people of the island. This North African actor's momentary assumption of imperial power onstage tellingly anticipated revolutionary struggles against colonial powers, like the Algerian fight for freedom from France, and the challenge to colonialist theatre-making advanced by the Negritude movement, in which Benglia would later take part. Widely covered at the time by the international press, Benglia's performance of Brutus Jones on French soil has gone virtually unnoticed in theatre scholarship, critical race studies, and American studies. Equally forgotten is its performative afterlife nearly a decade later in which Benglia performed another character from O'Neill's Emperor Jones, the Congo Witch-Doctor, in his own Montparnasse nightclub, conjuring a counter-performance to the 1931 Colonial Exposition. And lost almost entirely is the revival of L'Empereur Jones twenty-seven years later with Benglia's all-black theatre company in Paris. In spite of this "racial amnesia," Benglia was known throughout Algeria and [End Page 21] France for his classical stage repertoire;3 he was the first African actor to appear on a French national stage—tellingly while wearing the Emperor's coat. Throughout these pages I aim to show how this Franco-African performer deployed and subverted tropes of empire while performing characters from The Emperor Jones. I argue that these performative iterations of Jones mark not only a vital lost performance history of O'Neill's groundbreaking drama, but also the layered contexts and performative valences for performing bodies across the black Atlantic. While the 1923 performance of L'Empereur Jones has been mostly ignored, scholarly work has been done tracing the importance of performing black bodies in relation to empire, diaspora, and what Stephanie Leigh Batiste calls the "darkening mirrors" of imperial representation.4 Benglia's overlooked performance in Paris occurred almost a decade before the Depression-era productions that anchor Batiste's important work and on different transnational coordinates (Algeria and France), and therefore can offer fresh insights on transnational black identities, racial performativity, and black (specifically Franco-African) performance. Like the African American artists whom Batiste examines in her study, I seek to clarify Benglia's "dizzying, recursive (and quite paradoxical) form of participation in history, modernity, and the promise and failures" of transnational identity.5 What is particularly instructive about Benglia's performances on French stages and in his Parisian club is how this actor was tracing, indeed constituting, alternate cartographies of black internationalism and artistic expression. In shifting my analysis away from texts and toward embodied practices—from the archive to the repertoire, as Diana Taylor has put it—I show how Benglia struggled with and at times subverted racialized projections and diasporic discourse.6 My analysis is underpinned by notions of citationality and cross-temporality. I am tracking neither [End Page 22] a linear, positivist progression (from premiere to revival) nor a one-way cartographic flow (from colony to empire), but instead showing the force of imperial citation across diverse racial geometries and temporal framings. I am charting the performative trace, and the temporal tug, of the Emperor's remains.7 The Emperor Is Dead, Long Live the Emperor! The Emperor Jones was one of O'Neill's modernist experiments—a play resembling a monologue more than a full-length drama, more expressionistic than realistic, more circum-Atlantic than American. O'Neill's play was one of the most widely performed and traveled cultural artifacts...

Keywords for Southern Studies ed. by Scott Romine and Jennifer Rae Greeson

Reviewed by: Keywords for Southern Studies ed. by Scott Romine and Jennifer Rae Greeson Sarah E. Gardner Keywords for Southern Studies. Edited by Scott Romine and Jennifer Rae Greeson. The New Southern Studies. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016. Pp. [viii], 411. Paper, $32.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4962-6; cloth, $89.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4061-6.) Ever since Raymond Carver published his collection of short stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (New York, 1981), the formulation has been well used. From Nathan Englander's homage to Carver in What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (New York, 2011) to New Yorker parodies—such as Michael Gerber and Jonathan Schwartz's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Doughnuts" (May 10, 1999)—the conceit is now so commonplace, so well-worn, that it has perhaps lost its usefulness. (The September 17, 2015, Huffington Post article, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Hepatitis C," may have been the tipping point.) The thirty short essays that make up Keywords for Southern Studies, edited by Scott Romine and Jennifer Rae Greeson, suggest otherwise. In fact, Thomas F. Haddox employs the phrase in his essay on literature. Whether or not the contributors fall back on this wording—and most do not—the premise nonetheless undergirds much of the work presented here. What we talk about when we talk about segregation, then, or the Native South, or labor, or the black Atlantic, or indeed a whole host of other terms crucial for understanding the American South varies depending on time, place, disciplinary training, who is doing the talking, and who is doing the listening. [End Page 1024] The collection effectively and persuasively makes clear that there is nothing fixed or stable about the South. The field of southern studies is similarly unbounded. As the editors of this volume note, southern studies "is remaking itself" (p. 1). How then to pin down something that is constantly in flux? One does not try to do so, of course, for the attempt would be not only foolish, but also quite possibly pernicious. The consequences of limiting, defining, or imagining a fixed way of approaching a field of inquiry are, after all, real. The essays in Keywords for Southern Studies each point out the binds we have written ourselves into when we essentialize. Whatever southern studies is, then, the editors write, "it is mimed by the form of this volume, which does not presume to present a canon, a comprehensive account, or a curated catalog that demarcates the contours of a stable, shared field" (p. 1). Instead, the volume makes available "an idiosyncratic collection of essays on keywords" that its contributors deem "critical for the project of southern studies" (p. 1). The result, the editors readily concede, is a collection that is "contingent and fragmentary, but capacious enough to hold side by side various disciplinary and theoretical approaches, generational affinities, and intellectual perspectives on an arena of inquiry whose boundaries are constantly being renegotiated" (p. 1). Matthew Pratt Guterl's essay, "Plantation," serves as a useful example. He opens with a reasonable, if accusatory, assumption: "we usually imagine that a plantation is a uniquely southern thing: a big antiquated farm, set in the land of moonlight and magnolias, peopled by large numbers of poor, dark-skinned workers, and presided over by a small white minority" (p. 22). What's more, he continues, "We understand this representation of the plantation to be fixed in time, as an expression of the slaveholding South, from the settlement of the colonies until the Civil War's conclusion" (p. 22). That the word plantation conjures up this image—at once nostalgic and comfortable because the slaveholding plantation, along with its unsavory political implications, was destroyed by war—is itself an argument that has had legs since Lost Cause mythologizers evoked it during the late nineteenth century. A rich vein of scholarship tells us something else altogether, as Guterl makes clear, but a vibrant tourist industry counts on our discounting the plantation complex's "bone-breaking, race-making past" (p. 29). What we talk about when we talk about plantations matters profoundly...

Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic. By Wendy Wilson-Fall (Athens, Ohio University Press, 2015) 224 pp. $59.95 cloth $29.95 paper

<i>Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic</i>. By Wendy Wilson-Fall (Athens, Ohio University Press, 2015) 224 pp. $59.95 cloth $29.95 paper

F.Z.S. Peregrino, A Significant but Duplicitous Figure in the Black Atlantic World

The role of Francis Zaccheus Santiago Peregrino is one that has intrigued historians for many years. He represented a direct link between West Africa (Gold Coast, modern Ghana), Britain, the United States and South Africa. Peregrino was a campaigning editor and vocal supporter of black rights in both the United States and southern Africa. He appeared to be the embodiment of the black Atlantic. These qualities have, rightly, been celebrated, but there is another side to the man, which has received only limited attention. He was also someone of ruthless ambition. In New York he was accused of labour-broking practices that replicated slavery. In South Africa he thought nothing of denouncing some of his closest black associates to the white authorities. Peregrino also pursued his private agenda at the cost to the wider African and Coloured communities, threatening them at a critical moment in the formation of the Union of South Africa. This article traces his life in the USA, Britain and southern Africa to reveal Peregrino as a more complex and disturbing figure than has previously been acknowledged.

Ireland, slavery, antislavery, post-slavery and empire: an historiographical survey

ABSTRACTThis article traces the development of academic writing on Ireland's role in the Black Atlantic. In the nineteen thirties, publications appeared focusing on an Irish presence in the plantation complex. The nineteen seventies produced a study of the island's antislavery movement. Both discoveries were the work of lone pioneers. Meanwhile political developments after the Second World War produced American historians determined to understand this tenacious and resonant transatlantic institution. Thus the millennium proved to be a boom time for slavery studies, spreading out into investigation of the part played by the Irish. Historians were now joined by literary scholars. Historians, focused on the Importation, exploitation and emancipation of Africans, discussing whether or not Ireland's situation as Britain's first colony, shaped their attitude towards slavery in the New World. Literary scholars were increasingly drawn to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, finding parallels between Irish and Caribbean poets and novelists. The aim of this paper is to describe both approaches, leaving the reader to decide whether they illuminate or confound one another.

‘This was a Conradian world that I was entering’

Caryl Phillips has been accused of replicating the stereotyped view of a timeless, ahistorical Africa that Paul Gilroy puts forward in his paradigm of the Black Atlantic. Yet this article shows that Crossing the River and Phillips’s essays about Africa suggest ways in which Gilroy’s important paradigm of the black Atlantic could be broadened to become more inclusive of writing about Africa. Phillips draws inspiration from writers such as V S Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, and especially Joseph Conrad, to update the literary journey upriver and make it relevant to contemporary West African issues. A complex interplay of racial identities occurs when people from the African diaspora travel to Africa; this is a key preoccupation for Phillips when he rewrites Conrad. During the course of his river-journeys, Phillips meditates upon the complexities of being a black Westerner in Africa, examines the memory of slavery, colonialism and postcolonial unrest, problematises diasporan attempts to ‘return’ to Africa, and recognises the longstanding modernity of African countries.

Africana, Slavery, and Diaspora Studies - Biography and the Black Atlantic. Edited by Lisa A. Lindsay and John Wood Sweet. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Pp. 370. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $55.00 cloth.

Africana, Slavery, and Diaspora Studies - Biography and the Black Atlantic. Edited by Lisa A. Lindsay and John Wood Sweet. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Pp. 370. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $55.00 cloth.