African Americans on Africa: Colleen J. McElroy and the rhetoric of kinship

Abstract

This article primarily considers Over the Lip of the World (1999), a travel book about Madagascar by African American writer Colleen J. McElroy. It examines the way the text engages with the language of kinship, taking physical resemblances between the author and the people she meets, not as signs of common descent (as it often is for other African American writers visiting Africa) but as an artificial pretext for drawing attention to the marked differences between her relationship to Madagascar and her interlocutors' relationship to the United States.

Keywords:

• Colleen J. McElroy
• travel writing
• kinship
• coevalness
• chiasmus

Notes

1. For illuminating studies of McElroy's travel writing see Glen Winfield, '"Black/White Limits": Colleen J. McElroy Writes Travel', unpublished masters dissertation, Nottingham Trent University, 2007; and Tim Youngs, 'A Daughter Come Home? The Travel Writings of Colleen J. McElroy', New Literatures Review, no. 42 (2004), 57-74.

2. W. E. B. Du Bois, Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York: Library of America, 1986), 364-365.

3. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, 'Literature and Double Consciousness: Warring Images in Afro-American Thought', in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Writers in Politics: A Re-Engagement with Issues of Literature and Society (Oxford: James Currey, 1997), 40.

4. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, 'Literature and Double Consciousness: Warring Images in Afro-American Thought', in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Writers in Politics: A Re-Engagement with Issues of Literature and Society (Oxford: James Currey, 1997), 50.

5. Langston Hughes, Selected Poems (New York: Vintage, 1974), 266; Countee Cullen, On These I Stand: An Anthology of the Best Poems of Countee Cullen (New York: Harper and Row, 1947), 24-28. I cite these lines for the meaning which is commonly - if casually - attributed to them.

6. For a useful survey of African American travel writings about Africa, see James Campbell, Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005 (New York: Penguin, 2006); see also John C. Gruesser, 1990. 'Afro-American Travel Literature and Africanist Discourse', Black American Literature Forum, 24, no. 1 (1990), 5–10. Selections of relevant primary texts may be found in Alasdair Pettinger, ed., Always Elsewhere: Travels of the Black Atlantic (London: Cassell, 1998), and Farah J. Griffin and Cheryl J. Fish, eds, A Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African-American Travel Writing (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998).

7. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (London: Pluto Press, 1986), 102.

8. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (London: Pluto Press, 1986), 102-103.

9. Leslie Alexander Lacy, The Rise and Fall of a Proper Negro: An Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 122.

10. Idem.

11. Idem, 123.

12. Idem.

13. Maya Angelou, All God's Children Need Travelling Shoes (New York: Vintage, 1991), 35.

14. Idem.

15. Colleen J. McElroy, A Long Way from St Louie: Travel Memoirs (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1997), 218.

16. Colleen J. McElroy, Over the Lip of the World: Among the Storytellers of Madagascar (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1999), xi, 157.

17. Angelou, All God's Children, 21.

18. Zenga Longmore, Tap-Taps to Trinidad (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989), 252.

19. McElroy, A Long Way from St Louie, 70.

20. McElroy, A Long Way from St Louie, 299.

21. Colleen J. McElroy, 'Rewriting the Past Perfect: A Memorist's Approach', BMa: The Sonia Sanchez Literary Review, 9, no. 1 (2003), 242.

22. Julian Pitt-Rivers, 'Kinship III: Pseudo Kinship', in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. David L. Sills (New York: Macmillan 1968), vol 8, 408-413.

23. Surprisingly, this practice has received rather scant scholarly attention. But see Marc Shell, Children of the Earth: Literature, Politics and Nationhood (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) for a stimulating discussion of universal siblinghood.

24. Pitt-Rivers, 'Kinship III', 412.

25. Juliet Mitchell observes that the more a society invests in (idealised) sibling rhetoric, the less it appears to take notice of actual siblinghood, as if the only problematic power relations were vertical ones between generations, rather than horizontal ones between peers (Juliet Mitchell, Siblings: Sex and Violence (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), ix-xvi).

26. David M. Schneider, American Kinship: A Cultural Account (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1968), esp. 53-54.

27. David M. Schneider, American Kinship: A Cultural Account (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1968), esp, 116.

28. David M. Schneider, 'Kinship, Nationality and Religion in American Culture: Toward a Definition of Kinship', in Forms of Symbolic Action: Proceedings of the 1969 Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Society, ed. Robert F. Spencer (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969), 116-125.

29. See David M. Schneider, A Critique of the Study of Kinship (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), and Janet Carsten, ed., Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

30. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

31. Angelou, All God's Children, 98-105.

32. Angelou, All God's Children, 206.

33. McElroy, Over the Lip of the World, 8.

34. McElroy, Over the Lip of the World, 163.

35. McElroy, Over the Lip of the World, 5.

36. McElroy, Over the Lip of the World, 9 and 54 respectively.

37. McElroy, Over the Lip of the World, 9 and 54 respectively, 28–30.

38. McElroy, A Long Way from St Louie, 97-98.

39. See Max Nnny, 'Chiasmus in Literature: Ornament or Function?', Word and Image, no. 4 (1998), 51–59, for a useful introduction.

40. This aspect of chiasmus is discussed in Jeanne Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures in Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 122–155, and explored further by Ira Clark, '"Measure for Measure": Chiasmus, Justice, and Mercy', Style, 35, no. 4 (2001), 659-678.

41. Quoted in Sam Lebovic, 'The Creation of the Fulbright Program and the International Transmission of American Culture, 1945–1950', unpublished paper (2006), available at http://www.wage.wisc.edu/uploads/Globalizing%20Political%20History/Lebovic_06%20final.pdf (last accessed 14 November 2007), 19.

42. Quoted in Sam Lebovic, 'The Creation of the Fulbright Program and the International Transmission of American Culture, 1945–1950', unpublished paper (2006), available at http://www.wage.wisc.edu/uploads/Globalizing%20Political%20History/Lebovic_06%20final.pdf (last accessed 14 November 2007), 25.

43. Sarah Schulman, letter to Colleen J. McElroy, 4 April 1988, The Colleen J McElroy Archive, Raymond Williams Research Centre, Nottingham Trent University.

44. Colleen J. McElroy, personal communication, 26 January 2008.

45. McElroy, Over the Lip of the World, 144.

46. Ngũgĩ, 'Literature and Double Consciousness', 38.

47. Ngũgĩ, 'Literature and Double Consciousness', 50.

48. McElroy, Over the Lip of the World, xii.

49. McElroy, Over the Lip of the World, 7.

50. This correspondence is in the Colleen J. McElroy Archive. In fact Tiana Tsizaza went on to study at the University of Washington in Seattle (McElroy's own institution), and while a doctoral student, she travelled back to Madagascar to participate in an international conference on education and literature as an emissary of the University (Colleen J. McElroy, personal communication, 25 January 2008).