Locating black feminist resistance through diaspora and post-diaspora in Edwidge Danticat’s and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short stories

ABSTRACT

Migrating to the US is transformative in the short stories in Edwidge Danticat's Krik? Krak! and Chimamanda Adichie's The Thing Around Your Neck. The currents of Blackness, gender and class alter their characters' experiences of the world, shaped by the global flows of migration taking place under neoliberal capitalism. This essay explores the nuanced and conflicting ways diaspora and post-diaspora spaces can facilitate Black feminist resistance in Danticat's ‘Caroline's Wedding' and Adichie's ‘Imitation'. I offer a Black feminist analysis, paying attention to the literary body as the site where tensions are dramatised. My reading of Danticat's and Adichie’s short stories leads to a progressive reconsideration of diaspora.

KEYWORDS:

• Fiction
• Black feminism
• Edwidge Danticat
• Chimamanda Adichie
• diaspora
• post-diaspora

Acknowledgements

Thanks to John McLeod for comments on an early version of this article, and to Suzanne Scafe and the peer reviewers for their guidance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The publication of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993), James Clifford’s ‘Diasporas’ (1994), Stuart Hall’s ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’ (1994) and Avtar Brah’s Cartographies of Diaspora (1997) marked a shift in conceptualisations of diaspora, away from its association with a fixed ‘homeland’ and towards more critical ideas about cultural origins and mobility.

2 I capitalise Black to refer to people of African descent and the process of racialisation attached to their (our) bodies, and not political blackness in the British context.

3 ‘Big Man’ is a colloquial name referring to, in this case, a businessman dealing with lucrative government contracts.

4 To name some notable contemporary examples of bones manifesting in Haitian artistry, Danticat’s The Farming of Bones (1998) draws upon bone imagery as a double-metaphor for the cane worker labourers and the mass murder of Haitians living in Dominica during the Parsley Massacre of 1937, ordered by President Rafael Trujillo. The street artist and painter Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1981 ‘Ghost and Bones’ (white images of femurs and teeth against black) and the 1982 ‘Carbon Dating Systems Versus Scratchproof Tape’ (includes sketches of bones studded with words ‘marrow’ and ‘femur’) show the cultural significance of bones in Haitian art and culture (Belloni 1999; Artnet 2019). Similarly, Atis Rezistans are a modern collective of sculptors using discarded everyday objects and human bones found scattered on mausoleums to create avant-garde sculptures influenced by African and Haitian cultural heritage and a ‘dystopian sci-fi view of the future’ (Atis Rezistans 2019).

5 The British Museum Collection online 2018 entry for ‘The Ife Head’ cites Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects (2010, 404–49).

6 Robin Walker states: ‘Great Benin, also known as Edo, was an important state that flourished in southern Nigeria. In the fifteenth century, it was an empire distinguished by the sumptuousness and comfort of its capital, Benin City, and by the refinement of its royal art’ (Walker 2006, 330).

7 Evidence suggests the kingdom of Benin was oligarchical and patriarchal. Until 1897 the Oba (the divine King) controlled the trade of commodities and had power over the life and death of his subjects. See Kate Ezra, Royal Art of Benin (1992, 3) and Jacob Egharevba, A Short History of Benin (1960).