Black Transnationalism Research Articles

Jamaican-Canadian ‘Poetics of Relations’: Dub Poetry, Musical Rhythm, and Flows of Transnational Black Consciousness

The article places dub poetry in the context of traveling sounds of music and oral poetry between the Caribbean, Canada, and England. Looking at dub poetry from a hemispheric and transnational perspective and through the lens of Glissant’s ‘poetics of Relations,’ the article puts focus on Canadian dub poetry and relates it to Jamaican beginnings and diasporic extensions in Britain. As the article shows, dub poetry plays a key role as transnational and transgeneric sound archive (Antwi) and as poetic form of yearning for completion, thus adding new narratives to a larger discourse of Black transnationalism that is by no means limited or necessarily linked to “pan-Africanism or other kinds of Black-isms”. Instead, dub poetry also responds to all kinds of international movements such as anti-colonialism, socialism and feminism to create transnational imaginaries and historiographies of diasporic Black cultures.

Black Transnationalism and Diaspora in Hip Hop: An Analysis of Billy Woods’ “Asylum”

Black Transnationalism and Diaspora in Hip Hop: An Analysis of Billy Woods’ “Asylum”

Anti-apartheid transatlantic networks in the age of the civil rights struggle: Bloke Modisane in the United States

In the Spring of 1963, London-based South African exiled artist and intellectual Bloke Modisane traveled to the United States on a co-sponsored visiting lecture tour of ten historically black colleges and universities in the South. A guest of the American Society of African Culture (AMSAC) and the United Negro College Fund (UNCF), Modisane’s lectures were a combination of intellectual, political, and performative registers which provided treatments on topics such as African rhythms in music and dance, South African literature, race and identity, and the anti-apartheid struggle. The institutions that he lectured in were actively involved in the struggle for civil rights in the early 1960s, positioning his visit at the center of the ongoing black freedom struggle in America. This article argues that Modisane was an active participant in anti-apartheid transatlantic networks and made a small but significant contribution to the cultural dimension of the anti-apartheid and civil rights struggles as a public intellectual and artist. It focusses on the Southern college circuit of civil rights activism and aims to enrich our understanding of mid-century transatlantic pan-Africanism, cultural solidarity, and transnational linkages between black South African and African American intellectuals, especially realized in the literary rather than political-organizational locus of black transnationalism.

The Arts of Antifascist Black Transnationalism during the Spanish Civil War

This article asserts the critical role of art and literature in the resistance against fascism by situating the aesthetic work of African Americans as central to the transnational phenomenon of the Spanish Civil War. This article highlights the prehistory to the African American support of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 when news of Benito Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia galvanized members of the Harlem Renaissance. These two conflicts triangulated the imaginaries of the United States, Spain, and Ethiopia, producing a distinct form of antifascist Black transnationalism that extends work by Brent Hayes Edwards, Robert F. Reid-Pharr, and Nadia Nurhussein. To manifest this argument, this article examines Paul Robeson’s speeches at rallies in London that he later reprinted in his autobiography Here I Stand (1958) and Claude McKay’s posthumously published novel Amiable with Big Teeth about 1936 Harlem. Using archival research, this article analyzes the collage aesthetic of the scrapbook that the activist Thyra J. Edwards compiled in 1937 to record the actions of the Negro People’s Committee to Aid Spain. In sum, this article demonstrates the integral role of African American visual culture and literature to the development of twentieth-century antifascist ideology within a transnational perspective.

The Sonnet and Black Transnationalism in the 1930s

The Sonnet and Black Transnationalism in the 1930s

O PROFESSOR: UM ENSAIO

The essay seeks to present part of the academic, intellectual and political trajectory of W.E.B Du Bois throughout life and, on the other hand, how the processes of creative intellectual production took place in the midst of the various social barriers resulting from racist agencies present in the main American universities until the mid-1950s of the 20th century. Because of the racialization processes of North American society - and which reflected in the low recognition of Du Bois's performance in academic circles until the context of the 1960s - this essay seeks to point to the fact that since the publication of his doctoral thesis, obtained in the 19th century in Harvard, Du Bois presents a fruitful intellectual contribution, initiating studies of an interdisciplinary and intersectional character, such as the case of The Philadelphia Negro of 1899. Finally we present the importance of Du Bois's intellectual legacy is presented, not only for the formation’s process the study and research centers linked to Afro-descendants in the Diaspora and their respective social and political experiences, but also related to Du Bois's contribution to the history of black transnationalism.

Decolonization and Diaspora

Decolonization and Diaspora

A Corporate Plantation Reading Public: Labor, Literacy, and Diaspora in the Global Black South

Abstract This essay reconstructs the history of the Cotton Farmer, a rare African American newspaper edited and published by black tenant farmers employed by the Delta and Pine Land Company, once the world’s largest corporate cotton plantation located in the Mississippi delta. The Cotton Farmer ran from 1919 to circa 1927 and was mainly confined to the company’s properties. However, in 1926, three copies of the paper circulated to Bocas del Toro, Panama, to a Garveyite and West Indian migrant laborer employed on the infamous United Fruit Company’s vast banana and fruit plantations. Tracing the Cotton Farmer’s hemispheric circulation from the Mississippi delta to Panama, this essay explores the intersections of labor, literacy, and diaspora in the global black south. What do we make of a reading public among black tenant farmers on a corporate cotton plantation in the Mississippi delta at the height of Jim Crow? How did the entanglements of labor and literacy at once challenge and correspond with conventional accounts of sharecropping in the Jim Crow South? Further, in light of the Cotton Farmer’s circulation from Mississippi’s cotton fields to Panama’s banana fields, this essay establishes the corporate plantation as a heuristic for exploring the imperial logics and practices tying the US South to the larger project of colonial domination in the Caribbean and Latin America, and ultimately reexamines black transnationalism and diaspora from the position of corporate plantation laborers as they negotiated ever-evolving modes of domination and social control on corporate plantations in the global black south. In so doing, it establishes black agricultural and corporate plantation laborers as architects of black geographic thought and diasporic practice alongside their urban, cosmopolitan contemporaries.

Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State by Ira Dworkin

Reviewed by: Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State by Ira Dworkin Eric M. Washington CONGO LOVE SONG: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State. By Ira Dworkin. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2017. In Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State, Ira Dworkin, assistant professor of English at Texas A&M University, presents a rich text about Black transnationalism building upon the important theoretical contribution of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993). In this well-structured and well-argued book, Dworkin argues that African-American anti-colonialism found a straight channel to the Congo that also flowed to criticism of the whole of European colonialism during the twentieth century. The work begins with the writings of historian George Washington Williams and Presbyterian missionary William Sheppard, who both arrived in the Congo in 1890, thirteen years after Leopold II of Belgium claimed the Congo as his own personal real estate. Both men wrote of the atrocities committed under Leopold’s personal rule, namely the extraction of rubber using cruel means and punishment: chopping off of Congolese hands. The writings of Williams and Sheppard are the origins of African-American anti-colonial writing on the Congo. From this starting point, Dworkin masterfully analyzes Booker T. Washington’s protests of colonialism in the Congo, the translation work of missionary Edith Edmiston, the literature of Pauline E. Hopkins, the poetry of Langston Hughes, the African-American publication of the writings of Patrice Lumumba, and the speeches, interviews, and letters of Malcolm X. These sources all substantiate his argument that African Americans possessed transnational sensibilities when it came to protesting against colonialism in the Congo, and even the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in early 1961. One weakness in this study is Dworkin’s tentative engagement with Ethiopianism. In his chapter on Pauline E Hopkins, Dworkin discusses her use of the Ethiopian trope that reflects a tradition in African-American writing dating from the middle of the nineteenth century. Dworkin fails to define this literary tradition, though he relies somewhat on Wilson Jeremiah Moses’ The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, which includes a robust discussion of Ethiopiansim. The strengths of this work far outweigh the weakness. Quite significant is Dworkin’s treatment of Washington’s transnationalism. Not only did Washington write in protest to the atrocities committed in the Congo, but he envisioned the expansion of the “Tuskegee Model” there. These insights challenge recent scholarship that has argued that Washington’s interest in Africa was “secondary” to his Southern concerns. Dworkin provides convincing evidence that Washington’s Southern commitments and African concerns worked symbiotically. Another strength of the book is the chapter on Langston Hughes that centers on his poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Dworkin painstakingly engages a rich trove of evidence that leads to the conclusion that this famous poem contains anti-colonial references. This work adds to existing scholarship on African-American connections to Africa such as Campbell’s Songs of Zion and Middle Passages, and Kevin Gaines’ African Americans in Ghana. What this work does that is different from those historical monographs is that Dworkin is able to construct a corpus of African-American writings dedicated to the Congo crisis. This work should spark more scholarship on African-American discourse, both cultural and political, on Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. [End Page 120] Eric M. Washington Calvin College Copyright © 2019 Mid-America American Studies Association

The “Black Pacific” and decolonisation in Melanesia: Performing négritude and indigènitude

In the 19th century Melanesians were pejoratively labelled black by European maritime explorers (mela = black; nesia = islands). Emerging scholarship on the Black Pacific focuses on historical and contemporary identifications and articulations between Oceanian and African diasporic peoples, cultures and politics based upon shared Otherness to colonial occupiers. This essay contributes to such scholarship by presenting a perspective from Melanesia with a focus on music, a popular form of countercolonial expression. It examines in two broad phases person-to-person and person-to-text encounters with Atlantic-based notions of Black Power and negritude. The Pacific War serves as a dividing line and turning point, during and following which such encounters began to intensify. The discussion links these African diasporic intellectual traditions/discourses/epistemologies with that of indigenitude, that is, performed global expressions of Indigenousness, through allusions to Black transnationalism and the ways both movements address the “inferiority confusion” that arose from experiences of colonisation. It demonstrates how in the last 35 years in particular, Melanesians have worked to invert the demeaning intention of their colonial racial construction and, in the process, have helped to create what may now be thought of as the Black Pacific.

Grounds of Engagement: Apartheid-Era African American and South African WritingBeing Apart: Theoretical and Existential Resistance in Africana Literature

Grounds of Engagement: Apartheid-Era African American and South African WritingBeing Apart: Theoretical and Existential Resistance in Africana Literature

The African Atlantic: West African Literatures and Slavery Studies

The African Atlantic: West African Literatures and Slavery Studies Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi BOOKS REVIEWED Rebellious Histories: The Amistad Slave Revolt and the Cultures of Late Twentieth-Century Black Transnationalism ByMatthew J. Christensen Albany: State U of New York P, 2012. xiv + 188 pp. 9781438439709 paper. Metaphor and the Slave Trade in West African Literature By Laura T. Murphy Athens: Ohio UP, 2012. ix + 243 pp. 9780821419953 paper. SLAVERY STUDIES, COLONIALISM, AND AFRICAN LITERATURES Within African literary and cultural studies, work on the representations of domestic West African slavery or the historical slave trades across the Atlantic and the Sahara has been sparse. Laura Murphy and Matthew [End Page 149] Christensen address this paucity in two books with strikingly different perspectives and outcomes. Whereas Murphy focuses on metaphorization and veiled communications in representations of slavery, Christensen emphasizes direct contestations of slavery’s meanings and overt appropriations of symbolic narratives and icons that critique enslavement and its legacies of political and cultural dispossession. In his explicitly transnational study, Christensen examines the memorializations of the 1839 Amistad slave revolt in the United States and Sierra Leone as a site of contestation over the meanings of emancipation and political independence. Murphy studies representations of the slave trade in Ghanaian and Nigerian literatures. Both scholars examine texts and events from about the third decade of the nineteenth century to the first decade of the twenty-first century. In reading these contributions together, I frame my observations within an appraisal of the disjunctures among a globalizing slavery studies, African literary scholarship, studies of slavery narratives in the North Atlantic world, and the much researched study of slavery in the Americas. This wide gesture is necessary because as much as these books can be read as studies in African and African American literatures, they beckon toward larger cross-disciplinary conversations about the histories and representations of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism. Hitherto, most of the work on slavery in Africa has been produced outside literary scholarship. Such work, produced by historians, anthropologists, political scientists, legal scholars, and archeologists on the historical and contemporary practices of capture, enslavement, and bondage constitutes the cross-disciplinary field of slavery studies. Although much of the work in the field through the last three decades of the twentieth century was historical, the rise of contemporary slavery studies, the attention to human trafficking, and the increasing recognition of globalized labor exploitation have transformed historical slavery studies into contemporary global slavery studies. Increasingly, the slave trade is recognized as a globalizing force with multiple historical locations and participants. New and forthcoming journals and book series—such as the Journal of Global Slavery or Brill’s Studies in Global Slavery—continue to transform the field. It is thus imperative for scholars to historicize their studies of any form of slavery and slave trade within a larger landscape and temporality of co-extensive practices of enslavement and freedom. The transformations I list above influence my reading of Murphy and Christensen. While a simple Google search will reveal countless conferences and publications on the histories and forms of slavery and bondage in Africa, it will produce far fewer search results on the representations of slavery in African literatures. This disjuncture is historical. Slavery, the Atlantic slave trade, and abolition are acknowledged as catastrophic and traumatic events in Caribbean and American literatures. Hence, scholars studying representations of slavery in the Americas find a ready body of codified literatures overtly addressing its traumatic legacies. There is also a great interaction between scholars of Caribbean and American literatures of slavery and scholars of slavery studies in the Americas. Colonial conquest reconfigured Africa’s internal relationship to domestic slavery and the internal slave trades such that scholars of slavery in African literatures must take into account how colonialism impacted how slavery is remembered and represented. That is to say that all accounts of slavery and slave trade must be provincialized, i.e., taken out of any singularizing (North Atlantic or putatively global) narrative [End Page 150] and rescaled within a local nexus of meanings and historical mechanisms.1 For West African literatures, such provincializing gestures must take account of colonialism and its successor or related projects such as anticolonialism, independence, arrested decolonization...

On Writing in Exile

Using James Carey's notion of “historical consciousness,” this article conducted a historical analysis on how Robert F. Williams, a US-born civil rights activist and journalist, negotiated debates about race, racism, and class conflict while living in exile in Cuba and China during the 1960s. The author examined editorial coverage on Cuba and China published in Williams' Crusader between 1961 and 1969. An analysis of this newsletter highlights the existence and importance of a news outlet that has received little attention in histories on black journalism. It reveals the insights, contradictions, and contentions that are present in black journalists' alternative media texts published from abroad. Carey's notion of “historical consciousness” is helpful for understanding how black journalists' lived experiences and perceptions have emerged from the media texts they produced. These alternative journalism texts reveal how public debates about race, racism, and class conflict have evolved as black journalists have operated across national borders. This article, therefore, contributes to scholarship on the relationship between black journalism and transnationalism by examining specific conceptualizations of race and class politics across various contexts.

Cold War and Black Transnationalism: Aimé Césaire and Mercer Cook at the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists

Cold War and Black Transnationalism: Aimé Césaire and Mercer Cook at the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists

Rebellious Histories: The Amistad Slave Revolt and the Cultures of Late Twentieth-Century Black Transnationalism by Matthew J. Christensen (review)

Christensen, Matthew J. 2012. Rebellious Histories: The Amistad Slave Revolt and Cultures of Late Twentieth-Century Black Transnationalism. Albany: SUNY Press. $65.00 hc. $23.95 sc. $23.95 e-book. 202 pp.Sengbe Pieh, often known in US as Joseph Cinque, was one of fifty-three captives who staged a successful revolt aboard slave ship Amistad in 1839. He was an outspoken advocate for rights of captives when they fought in US courts for their return to Africa. More than 150 years later, Pieh is probably most widely known in United States as heroic protagonist of 1997 Steven Spielberg film Amistad, but he is, more significantly, a beloved icon in Sierra Leonean public arts and theater. He is a symbol of Sierra Leonean national pride and a figure of agency and courage of captive Africans. In United States, he is an emblem of moral authority in exaggerated retellings of nineteenth-century America's emerging devotion to liberty and democracy. His image has been exploited by both Sierra Leonean and US governments to create an imagined heritage of revolutionary heroism in defense of freedom, a lineage from which both governments claim descent. At same time, for political activists, Pieh is an icon of Black transnationalism and centuries- long struggle against global capital's exploitation of people of African descent around world.Matthew Christensen investigates this powerfully elastic trope of revolutionary-who-would-not-be-enslaved in his new book Rebellious Histories: The Amistad Slave Revolt and. Cultures of Late Twentieth-Century Black Transnationalism. As Christensen illustrates, Sengbe Pieh and Amistad revolt are mobilized as symbols by people of African descent to critique contemporary patterns of racialized, global and emblematize complex dynamics of black transnational subject formation within global networks of capitalist production, past and present (10). Ironically, however, image of slave revolt is also appropriated as a rhetorical tool of neoliberal propagandists, who perniciously utilize language of freedom and equality to justify development and other political schemes (such as structural adjustment programs of 1990s) that force African nations into dependent status through debt, undermine opportunity for citizens of African nations, and exacerbate inequality for people of African descent.Christensen's recounting of life of Amistad narrative reveals that, by twentieth century, slave revolt was largely forgotten in Sierra Leone by everyone except a few academics. In 1987, narrative resurfaced through two complementary documents, one published by Sierra Leonean government at request of then presidentjoseph Saidu Momoh and other produced a few months later by United States Information Service for distribution through its Sierra Leone ambassador. Both documents celebrated heroes of Sierra Leone in attempts to bolster each office's hegemonic power over state and national imaginary (58).But these simplistic images of state power and heroism did not go uncontested. Through well-veiled double-speak that skillfully avoided government censorship, Charlie Haffner's play Amistad. Kata-Kata (1988) produced a counter- history to totalizing narrative produced by governments. As Christensen deftly argues, trope of cannibalism-the fear that reportedly motivated Sengbe Pieh and his compatriots to slave-ship rebellion-is evoked as a potent counter-metaphor that exposes the economics of exploitation that consumed enslaved African bodies and decimated African communities from which they were stolen (59). In months following 1992 coup against Momoh's regime and twenty-four-year single-party rule of All People's Congress, largely undereducated and underemployed young men launched a public art campaign in which they painted portrait of world-traveling political icon Sengbe Pieh (among others) on walls across city as a reminder of political empowerment of youth. …

Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era by Brian Russell Roberts (review)

Reviewed by: Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era by Brian Russell Roberts Z. Hall Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era. By Brian Russell Roberts. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. 2013. “The ambassadorial tradition in African American writing has remained uninterrogated in relation to one of the New Negro era’s major arenas of political culture. This political culture operated on the planetary scale of official internationalism, and it became co-constitutive with the cultural politics of New Negro artistic ambassadorship” (14). American studies, and African American and black diasporan literature and culture scholar Brian Roberts probes U.S. international diplomacy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to illuminate the “strong and weak, formal and informal, connections between official internationalism and African American culture” (10). His work “offers critical access to previously unrecognized black internationalists tradition produced as African American and U.S. imperial cultures have met and shaped one another” (8). Roberts arranges dialogues among the fields of anti-imperialist critique, African American literary studies, and studies in black transnationalism to demonstrate how the literary and diplomatic performances of African American writers functioned rhetorically to, at some moments, undercut [End Page 216] U.S. diplomatic intentions yet, at other moments, operated as a means of promoting the imperial sway of the United States. Arranged in three parts, Artistic Ambassadors outlines the interlocking dimensions of race, aesthetic, and international representation, and “outlines the ways in which black work in diplomacy played previously unsuspected roles in shaping major African American representational concerns, including the capacity of New Negro race men to speak for the nation’s black masses, the methods of race representation under dispute in the Booker T. Washington/W. E. B. Du Bois debate, and the signifying status of women and the black diaspora within domestic and international African American cultures” (6). Roberts examines the aesthetic and political representations of famous figures such as Frederick Douglass, James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, and others and brings them into dialogue with the work of lesser-known black official and unofficial writer-diplomats of the New Negro era. Part one articulated the struggles faced by luminaries such as Frederick Douglass and lesser known African American diplomats in creating a narrative for the New Negro to supplant the myth of the Old Negro—ranging from Jim Crow to Zip Coon, Rastus to Sambo, Uncle Tom to Aunt Jemima—created by white Americans. Part two described a politics of immanence in which race becomes incidental to New Negro internationalism. Insider status becomes paramount though performances of immanence were inevitably imperfect and incomplete. Part three examined the “integration of hip knowingness of black vernacular culture into official diplomacy’s traditionally staid approach to internationalism” (118). It would have been informative if this work examined how the antecedent rhetoric of the Old Negro contained in U.S. cultural exports, predating and contemporary with the deployment of African American diplomats, weighed on the effectiveness of the representatives. Robert’s debut book is a challenging and enlightening interrogation of the international and literary projects of New Negro era figures. In addition to African American and American Studies scholars, this text is of interest to political science and international studies scholars, and literary critics. Z. Hall Independent Scholar, Kansas City, Missouri Copyright © 2014 Mid-America American Studies Association

Scattering Being: Leo Bersani and Diasporic Modernity

Scattering BeingLeo Bersani and Diasporic Modernity Mikko Tuhkanen (bio) In The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Transnationalism, Brent Hayes Edwards introduces a term to diaspora studies that has since the book’s publication gained considerable traction: décalage (2003). Borrowing it from Léopold Sédar Senghor, Edwards mobilizes the French term to render visible the varied practices that African-descended intellectuals, activists, and artists deployed in the 1920s and 1930s, a period of effervescence in black trans-national activity. For him, décalage offers a way to consider the negotiations, encounters, translations, and misunderstandings that constitute black transnationalism. It designates a mode of movement in a diasporic world fractured by disparate histories, languages, and national ideologies. Rather than focusing on the most familiar genres, Edwards excavates an archive of “minor” modernisms in letters, anthologies, journals, and newsletters published across the diaspora. The uneven circulation of these [End Page 53] texts across national borders and languages reveals the diaspora as a system of multiplicity. Variously translated as a “gap” or “hiatus” or “jet lag,” décalage allows Edwards to theorize diaspora as a field whose functioning is premised on a constitutive incompleteness and instability. As he explains, the term refers to the removal of a prosthesis that has supplemented a structural insufficiency: The verb caler means “to prop up or wedge” something (as when one leg on a table is uneven). So décalage in its etymological sense refers to the removal of such an added prop or wedge. Décalage indicates the reestablishment of a prior unevenness or diversity; it alludes to the taking away of something that was added in the first place, something artificial, a stone ort a piece of wood that served to fill some gap or to rectify some imbalance. (2003, 13–14) The chronotope suggests a damaged structure, an entity whose movement is predicated not on the perfection of its system, but on that which is constitutively missing from it. In denoting “jet lag”—décalage horaire—it evokes the temporal dislocations that have frequently attended representations of modernity, of a world whose speedy technologies confound the body’s adaptive capabilities. This is a world whose central dilemma Pauline Hopkins and Richard Wright—diasporic intellectuals whose work immediately antedates and succeeds the period that concerns Edwards—suggest is condensed in the query “What’s the time?”1 As it happens, the term with which Edwards asks us to reconsider modernist diasporic practices plays a crucial role in certain psychoanalytic ontologies. In The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art, his study of the aporetic structure of psychoanalytic thought, Leo Bersani claims: “Sexuality is a particularly human phenomenon in the sense that its very genesis may depend on the décalage, or gap, in human life between the quantities of stimuli to which we are exposed and the development of ego structures capable or resisting or, in Freudian terms, binding those stimuli” (1986, 38). Bersani borrows the term from Jean Laplanche, whose reading of Freud inspires what may be called “the psychoanalytic turn” in Bersani’s earlier studies A Future for Astyanax (1976), “The Other Freud” (1978), Baudelaire and Freud (1977) and—less explicitly—The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé (1982). [End Page 54] In The Freudian Body, Bersani alludes to the theory that he draws from Laplanche, according to which sexuality names a mode of survival in which the hilflos organism turns overwhelming excitations into an experience of jouissance, a pleasurable undoing of the incipient egoic structures. For Laplanche, and Bersani after him, the temporal delay of décalage precipitates hominization, becoming-human, in several senses. It names the missing foundation, in deconstructive terms the aporia, of the structures that are called human. The constitutive difference that Freudian psychoanalysis locates in the self suggests that (human) being— rather, (human) becoming—must be thought in terms of a belated accounting of an originary dispersal. The repetition of the term across a number of intellectual traditions invites us to approach décalage as a “keyword” for thinking about the investments involved in twentieth-century conceptualizations of modernity’s ontologies.2 Ann Cvetkovich suggests we understand...

Escaping the Tropics Through New York: Eric Walrond and Claude McKay in the American Grain

In claiming the writers Claude McKay and Eric Walrond for the Harlem Renaissance, literary scholars have often elided these writers’ Caribbean origins, treating them as a seamless part of that move-ment’s nationally-oriented racial contestation. More recently, McKay and Walrond have been held up as exemplars of black transnationalism, in which their peripatetic careers illustrate the restless, expansive networks of diasporic connection forged in the early part of the twentieth century. This essay instead examines the two authors with an eye toward their status as displaced exiles from the Caribbean who consciously sought both personal and professional success in the United States. Focusing particularly on Walrond’s Tropic Death (1926) and McKay’s A Long Way from Home (1937) the essay explores the authors’ ambivalent (and differently classed) embrace of the United States as a crucial site of artistic and political possibility. In doing so, it demonstrates how, for Walrond and McKay, the United States represented a complicated horizon of aesthetic production, functioning simultaneously as a liberating, bohemian site for experimental literary practice and as a frightening locus of racializing imperial power. Against the reflexive dismissal of the United States as merely a reprehensible perpetrator of global imperialism, the essay employs these two authors’ experience to suggest that the affective, aspirational aspects of United States culture can also be seen, from particular vantages in the Global South, to offer (in both literal and figurative ways) an attractive, politically productive form of belonging in the world.

Message from the Editor

Student AnthropologistVolume 3, Issue 4 p. 3-7 ArticleOpen Access Message from the Editor First published: 01 December 2020 https://doi.org/10.1002/j.sda2.20130304.0001AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat References 1Clarke Kamari 2004 Mapping Yorùbá Networks: Power And Agency in the Making of Transnational Communities. Durham: Duke University Press. 2Johnson Paul Christopher 2007 Diasporic Conversions: Black Carib Religion and the Recovery of Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press 3Hanchard, Michael 2004 Black Transnationalism, Africana Studies, and the 21st Century. Journal of Black Studies 35(2): 139– 153. 4Matory, J. Lorand 2005 Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 52008 Free to Be a Slave: Slavery as a Metaphor in the Afro-Atlantic Religions. In Africas of the Americas: Beyond the Search for Origins in the Study of Afro- Atlantic Religions. Stephan Palmie, ed. Pp. 351– 380. Leiden: Brill. 6 Stephan Palmié (ed.) 1996 Whose Centre, Whose Margin? Notes Towards An Archaeology of US Supreme Court Case 91-948, 1993 Church of the Lukumi vs. City of Perks, Hialeah, South Florida. In Inside And Outside The Law: Anthropological Studies Of Authority And Ambiguity. Olivia Harris, ed. Pp. 184– 209. London: Routledge. 72008 Africas of the Americas: Beyond the Search or Origins in the Study of Afro- Atlantic Religions. Leiden: Brill. 8Scott Julius 1986 The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution. Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University. 9Selka Stephen 2013 Religion and the Transnational Imagination. Nova Religio 16(4) 5– 10. Volume3, Issue42013Pages 3-7 ReferencesRelatedInformation

Black Transnationalism: 20th‐Century South African and African American Literatures

AbstractThis review article considers recent criticism on transnational literary and cultural relationships between black South Africans and African Americans across the 20th century. Using Black Atlantic and comparative models as the basis for discussion, this essay maps past patterns, current trends, and new directions in this particular strand of black transnational studies, while providing some commentary on certain developments in the field.