Afrodiasporic forms
Subtitle: slavery in literature and culture of the African diaspora
By: Raquel Kennon
Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
Published: 2022
Place of publication: Baton Rouge
Language: eng
ISBN-13: 9780807177648
Copyright date: 2022
Subjects: Slavery in literature; Slavery in mass media; Literature; Black authors; History and criticism; African diaspora
Description: "In Afrodiasporic Forms, Raquel Kennon provides an interdisciplinary, transnational literary and cultural study of modern racialized slavery. Blending close readings with cultural criticism that focuses on products of slavery's afterlife-poetry, prose, plays, painting, telenovelas, sculpture, photography, and more-this innovative work opens up cross-cultural conversations about how imaginative uses of the past inform understandings of the African diaspora. Chapters analyze divergent texts and artistic forms engaging slavery's memory spanning from the 1830s to the twenty-first century and ranging across genres and geographies to trace contradictions, ambiguities, and contestations within diasporic narratologies of slavery. With its comparative readings of global genres, subgenres, and cultural modes, Afrodiasporic Forms unsettles dominant, US-centered, Anglophone narratives and refuses a definitive or singularly authoritative narrative of slavery. Kennon's analysis traverses geographies and spatiotemporalities to focus on how transnational sites of slavery are reimagined in and through texts over time, as processes of remembering and forgetting reconfigure these images and spaces. As a work of comparative slavery studies, Afrodiasporic Forms: Slavery in Literature and Culture of the African Diaspora brings into crisis the very expectation of coherence and linearity in a global economic stratagem marked by concealment, discontinuity, and rupture"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction. "Traveling Through Fog": Slavery's Memorial Expressions in the Black World; title: "White Skin, Black Slavery": Bernardo Guimaräes's A Escrava Isaura and the Global Telenovela; title: Subtle Resistance: On Sugar and the Mammy Figure in Kara Walker's A Subtlety and Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose; title: "Black Flesh After Flame": Lynching, Resistance, and the Legacy of Slavery in the Poetry of Jean Toomer and Robert Hayden; title: Os Laços de Lembrança e Esquecimento: Reading Pelourinho, Castro Alves's "O navio negreiro," Carolina Maria de Jesus's Quarto de despejo, and Other Twentieth-Century Brazilian Literature; title: Azúcar, (Auto)biografía, and Absence: Juan Francisco Manzano, Esteban Montejo, and the Cuban Poetics of Slavery; title: Epilogue. A Gate of Return: Toward an Infinite Sum of Afrodiasporic Forms.