The sweet part and the sad part: Black Power and the memory of Africa in African American and black British literature

Abstract

This paper examines the approach toward narratives of Black Power by African American and black British writers in the post-Civil Rights era. The relationship to Black Power politics is explored here in the particular context of how African American and black British writers are perceived to relate to a “memory of Africa”; how “Africanness” fits into these diverse configurations of contemporary black identity. African American writers often find that Black Power, with its heavy reliance upon iconography, has failed to acknowledge the fluid relationship which exists in African American communities and artforms with a traditional African American past, and with a “memory of Africa” within that tradition. The performance of Black Power is a practice which is shown to distance the present from the past, whereas traditional African American artforms are understood to figure performance as a site where the past may “possess” the present. Black British authors are not concerned with situating the memory of Africa as part of a continuous tradition in the way that African American writers are. Both American tropes of blackness, and the memory of Africa itself, are dramatized in black British fiction as inherited tropes which must be adapted in order to bear any relevance to contemporary experience. The very different kinds of emphasis that writers from these two cultural scenarios place upon notions of performance and tradition, in relation to blackness, lead us to discover that narratives in the vein of the “Black Atlantic” must be approached with some caution if they are understood to provide a global locus of identification while also respecting specific conditions of local cultures.

Keywords:

• African American literature
• black British literature
• civil rights movement
• black Atlantic
• cultural memory
• black identity

Notes

1. The term “black British” functions most usefully for me as “a collective term that covers an imagined experiential field of overlapping territories. While at its narrowest it merely refers to writers with an African-Caribbean background, at its widest, it can include writing that takes recourse to domains such as Africa, Asia or the Caribbean and attendant cultural and aesthetic traditions. [ … The] space denoted by the label in question is far from homogenous; on the contrary, its heterogeneity is one of its defining features” (Stein, “Cultures of Hybridity,” 80). While recognizing the diversity of ethnic and cultural identities which the term “black British” can indicate – including people born and raised in Africa – the argument advanced here applies to writers who have not resided on the African continent.

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3. Christian, “Introduction,” 10.

4. McAlister, Epic Encounters, 95.

5. McAlister, Epic Encounters, 105.

6. Christian, “Introduction,” 10. Emphasis added.

7. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 189.

8. Wideman, “Preface,” The Homewood Books, xi.

9. Cited in Singh, Black Is a Country, 202–3.

10. Werner, quoted in Jahn, “Will the Circle,” 58.

11. McAlister, Epic Encounters, 153–4.

12. Wideman, Philadelphia Fire, 7.

13. Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 224.

14. Wideman, Philadelphia Fire, 9.

15. Carden, “If the City,” 476.

16. Wideman, Philadelphia Fire, 7–8.

17. Wideman, Philadelphia Fire, 10.

18. Singh, Black is a Country, 4–5.

19. Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” 11.

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22. Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” 28.

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25. Morrison, Song of Solomon, 54.

26. Morrison, Song of Solomon, 70.

27. Morrison, Song of Solomon, 74.

28. Morrison, “Memory, Creation, and Writing,” 387.

29. Morrison, “Memory, Creation, and Writing,”, 387.

30. Davis, “An Interview with Toni Morrison,” 225.

31. Davis, “An Interview with Toni Morrison,”

32. Reed, Mumbo Jumbo, 130.

33. Phillips, “Following On,” 34–5.

34. Gates, “A Reporter At Large,” 179.

35. Evaristo, Lara, 73.

36. Evaristo, Lara, 73, 75, 76, 73.

37. “Ozwald Boateng: Why Style Matters.”

38. Kay, Trumpet, 192.

39. Kay, Trumpet, 136.

40. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 82.

41. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 82–3.

42. Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice, 62–3.

43. Chrisman, “Journeying to Death,” 454.

44. Kay, Trumpet, 34.

45. Hall, “Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation,” 217.

46. Phillips, Crossing the River, 1–2.

47. Phillips, Crossing the River, 179–80.

48. Rice, “Heroes across the Sea,” 229.

49. “Joyce. That was all he said. Just, Joyce. I could see the gap in the middle of his teeth. At the bottom. And then he reached out and pulled me towards him. I couldn't believe it. He'd come back to me. He really wanted me. That day, crying on the platform, safe in Travis's arms. For two hundred and fifty years I have listened. To the haunting voices. Singing: Mercy, Mercy Me. (The Ecology.) Insisting: Man, I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong. Declaring: Brothers and Friends. I am Toussaint L'Ouverture, my name is perhaps known to you. Listened to: Papa Doc. Baby Doc. Listened to voices hoping for: Freedom. Democracy. Singing: Baby, baby. Where did our love go? Samba. Calypso. Jazz. Jazz” (Phillips, Crossing the River, 236).

50. Fryer, Staying Power, 191.

51. Martin, Incomparable World, 28–9.

52. Coughlan, “Soldiers of Misfortune,” 8.

53. Martin, Incomparable World, 76.

54. Martin, Incomparable World, 121.

55. Martin, Incomparable World, 143.

56. Hall, “Minimal Selves,” 117.

57. Evaristo, Lara, 88.

58. Evaristo, Lara, 92.

59. Evaristo, “New Writing Worlds,” 1–2. Emphasis added.

60. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 4.

61. Dayan, “Paul Gilroy's Slaves, Ships, and Routes,” 9, 7.

62. Wainwright, “Back to Black,” 115. Wainwright is commenting upon the exhibition Back to Black: Art, Cinema and the Racial Imaginary, curated by Richard Powell, David A Bailey and Petrine Archer-Straw. Whitechapel Gallery, London (7 June–4 September 2005), The New Art Gallery, Walsall (30 September–20 November 2005).