ISSUES AND AESTHETICS OF (MIS)REPRESENTATION IN SELECTED BLACK DIASPORAN LITERATURE (original) (raw)

The black diasporan literature is a broad term applicable to literatures that revolve around the diverse experiences of Africans who share a peculiar history of dispersal, and other blacks of African descent in the diaspora. The Black diaspora has been conceived as being primarily a product of the dual factors of slavery and colonialism of the blacks. In view of this, the black diasporan literature consists of two literary traditions, the African-American and Caribbean literary traditions. African-American literature developed from the verbal modes of vernacular/oral traditions of storytelling, slave work songs and spirituals, all of which heavily impacts its written modes. The Caribbean literary tradition, on the other hand, centres on the dynamic peculiarities of the lives of the millions of Africans and others who were brought to the Caribbean islands between the 15th and 19th centuries. This study therefore attempts an analysis of six selected texts across important periods in the history of the two literary traditions, with a focused examination of the aesthetics of representations and identity in the black diaspora. From the African-American literature, Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, An American Slave Written by Himself is analysed, alongside Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. From the Caribbean literary tradition, the analysed texts include Derek Walcott's "The Schooner Flight" poem, V. S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas, and Samuel Selvon's The Lonely Londoners. The study finds that the issues of representation and identity are evident in Olaudah's slave narrative, as he tries to scale from the point of being objectified to being 'subjectified'. In Ellison's challenging novel, the quest for identity is at the core, with the invisible man's loss of identity and his desperate attempts to discover or 'invent' his true self. In Hurston's masterpiece, the black Jezebel stereotype indirectly informs the changing selves of the black female characters. From the other side of the coin, Walcott's poetry portrays the paradox of hybrid inheritance in the Caribbean through the persona Shabine. Also, in Naipaul’s insightful novel, the issues of representation and identity are driven home by the effects of dislocation, rootlessness and culture clash. In Selvon’s representative novel, othering and misrepresentation is found to be the factor behind the issues around the complex identity of Caribbean migrants in black London. Hence, the study concludes that at different points in the history of the black diaspora, the issues of identity and representation are pertinent, thereby justifying their strong influence in the texts of the black diasporan literature.