Black is the Journey, Africana the Name
Описание книги
In this highly original book, Maboula Soumahoro explores the cultural and political vastness of the Black Atlantic, where Africa, Europe, and the Americas were tied together by the brutal realities of the slave trade and colonialism. Each of these spaces has its own way of reading the Black body and the Black experience, and its own modes of visibility, invisibility, silence, and amplification of Black life. By weaving together her personal history with that of France and its abiding myth of color-blindness, Maboula Soumahoro highlights the banality and persistence of structural racism in France today, and shows that freedom will be found in the journey and movement between the sites of the Atlantic triangle. Africana is the name of that freedom. How can we build and reflect on a collective diasporic identity through a personal journey? What are the limits and possibilities of this endeavor, when the personal journey is that of oft-erased bodies and stories, de-humanized lives, and when Black populations in Africa, the Americas, and Europe identify and misidentify with each other, their sensibilities shaped by the particular locales in which their lives unfold? This book makes an important intellectual contribution to contemporary public conversations and theoretical inquiry into race, racism, blackness, and identity today, as it probes and questions the academic methodologies that have functioned as structures of exclusion.
Оглавление
Maboula Soumahoro. Black is the Journey, Africana the Name
Table of Contents
Guide
Pages
Critical South
Black is the Journey, Africana the Name
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Quote
Acknowledgments
Translator’s Note
Notes
Foreword Saidiya Hartman
Notes
Introduction Black Speech/Speaking Blackness
On diaspora
What is this “I”?
Notes
1 The Triangle Oxymoronic Circles
Chronotope
Scholarly and personal implications
An intellectual tradition
The question of return
Notes
2 University Trajectory Atlantic Peregrinations
Black orbit
Studying in France
Studying overseas
Notes
3 The Hexagon An Ambiguous Adventure
“For the great MCs, on behalf of a grateful ‘hood’”1
2005: “Right the wrong, by any means necessary”9
Public discourse
Black History Month (BHM)/Africana Days
To be done with the burden of race
Notes
Conclusion The Orbs are Black, or, What Beauty Owes to Chaos
Notes
Index
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Maboula Soumahoro
Translated by Kaiama L. Glover
.....
French is my mother tongue, though it is not my mother’s tongue. Might France be my mother? … This linguistic gulf, result of a displacement, a migration, themselves echoes of a far longer history of displacements and migrations – might it reveal something about a vision of the world and of global history that are somehow incarnated in my Black body, moving through a society that claims to be blind to race? (p. 16)
This autobiography of reading is also an account of linguistic estrangement. The question of a mother tongue is as pressing for Soumahoro as any other Black writer in the diaspora, and she is as intent on finding an idiom, a tongue that might liberate her from the colonial script, from alienation and estrangement, from being a foreigner in her natal land. Unlike her parents, Soumahoro doesn’t speak Jula or any other African language. Her first language is French, yet the language in which is she is most proficient feels foreign on the tongue. It is the constant reminder of her displacement in diaspora; it is the linguistic register of her dispossession and anguish.12
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