The Black Atlantic Revisited: Ana Maria Gonçalves's Um defeito de cor (original) (raw)

New Perspectives on the Black Atlantic: Definitions, Readings, Practices, Dialogues, ed. by Bénédicte Ledent and Pilar Cuder-Domínguez

2012

This collection of essays attempts to expand the notion of the «Black Atlantic» beyond its original racial, geographical, linguistic and cultural borders while acknowledging its remarkable ability to disturb established historical truths and to go beyond traditional dichotomies, thereby providing an essential tool for cross-cultural understanding. It is divided into four sections, each of them dealing with a different approach to the question of the «Black Atlantic». «Definitions» touches on the various limitations of Gilroy’s original concept. «Readings» focuses on how the «Black Atlantic» can be productively used in readings of certain literary texts. «Practices» shifts towards the practical applications of the concept in order to explore the impact it has had on academic disciplines and examine to what extent it may have altered their epistemology and working procedures. Finally, «Dialogues» engages with the «Black Atlantic» from the perspectives of two creative writers whose work includes transatlantic themes and characters.

Home, or the Limits of the Black Atlantic

Research in African Literatures, 2014

Building on Africanist and third wave feminist critiques of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, this essay examines how the notion of diaspora is interpreted by non-anglophone women writers of African descent. In particular, it focuses on the work and careers of two women authors: Afro-Brazilian novelist and academic Conceição Evaristo and Mozambican fiction writer and essayist Paulina Chiziane. Both of these authors participate in international events about the black diaspora and their work has been widely translated. Despite playing active roles in transnational academic and literary communities, however, these two authors repeatedly focus on national concerns in their fiction. The essay argues that many black women writers privilege domestic spaces, such as home and nation, over the space of the black diaspora. Finally, the essay uses reflections on Evaristo’s and Chiziane’s work to revise Toni Morrison’s role in Gilroy’s black Atlantic, starting with her most recent novel, Home.

Sor Juana's Black Atlantic: Colonial Blackness and the Poetic Subversions of Habla de negros

Hispanic Review, 2018

In this essay, I devise the term Hispanic Black Atlantic as a critical tool and discursive geographical space to rethink and revisit Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic model. I envision Sor Juana’s colonial Mexican milieu as an integral part of the African diaspora and the Black Atlantic paradigm forged by Gilroy. To move the literary criticism of Sor Juana’s poetic corpus toward a new conversation about colonial Spanish American literature and the multilingual world it reflects, I use Sor Juana’s villancicos to trace her avowal of Blackness—in its ideological and racial dimensions—as a critical category that travels across space and time while simultaneously turning on its head assumptions and claims about Blackness altogether.

AFRICAN DIASPORAS: a bridge across the Atlantic // DIÁSPORAS AFRICANAS NA AMERICA DO SUL: Uma ponte sobre o Atlântico (Fotos de Januário Garcia)

Textos e Organização de Julio César de Tavares, fotografia e concepção Januário Garcia. 1 ed. – Brasília DF: Fundação Alexandre de Gusmão, 2008., 2008

1.DiásporaAfricana–AméricadoSul 2.MovimentosNegros–AméricadoSul 3. Diáspora Africana – Etnografia e História 4. Diáspora Africana – Fotografias 5. Diáspora Africana – Argentina 6. Diáspora Africana – Brasil 7. Diáspora Africana – Colombia 8. Diáspora Africana – Peru 9. Diáspora Africana – Uruguai 10. Diáspora Africana – Venezuela 11. Diáspora Africana–Suriname I.Garcia,Januário. II.Título 144 p.: il. Color. Textos em português, inglês, francês e espanhol.

Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic Quarter a Century Later: Cultural Implications of African Diaspora’s Revision of Modernity

International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation

In his seminal book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) Paul Gilroy traces an account of the Black diaspora as a cosmopolitan, historical and cultural Atlantic phenomenon that challenges and corrects Modern construction of ‘culture,’ ‘nation,’ ‘history,’ and ultimately ‘identity.’ Although the book was conceived quarter a century ago, it still continues to influence Black Studies, Migration Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Diaspora Studies. The present paper intends to shed light and reflect on the two most influential aspects of Gilroy’s book today. One such aspect is Gilroy’s exploration of Black Atlantic histories of (criss)-crossing, migration, interconnection, travel, and exile-- together with the form, content, and performance of diasporic expressive forms-- to revisit the tradition of Modernity and Enlightenment rationality. The other aspect, following from the first, is that while interrogating “national,” “nationalistic,” and “ethnically absoluti...

AMST 470/AFST 406/LAS 450 - Blatinx: Black Identities in Latin America

This course interrogates the problem of Blackness in Latin America. While it is indisputable that Iberian America participated in the transatlantic slave trade, receiving some 90% of all Africans transported in the Middle Passage, locating Black identity amongst their descendants is more challenging. This is because the predominant identitarian notion of Blackness emerged historically in Anglo American contexts, particularly the United States. While idealized notions of White racial purity in the United States catalyzed an all-encompassing Black category as the site of Whiteness’ exclusion, idealizations in discourse and representation of mestizaje in Latin America have worked against the emergence of a strong racial identity in favor of national identity, masking the materiality of the Black presence within these national-cultural formations. Nevertheless, there remains an effervescence of Black expression in Latin American political movements, visual arts, music, dance, and foodways, among others, that strongly index notions of Blackness as a political and social location, a set of orientations towards life, an ethical outlook, a shared historical trajectory, and performance aesthetics and stylistics.These articulate Blackness across the Americas and reveal the African Diaspora to be a differentiated whole. Through approaching the problem of Blackness around several overarching themes in the historical development of Latin America, this class, then, locates Blackness by looking against the grain into the cracks and crevices of the myth of mestizaje. What alternative Black histories lie dormant within this myth? What does this erasure teach us about global formations of antiblackness? This class introduces students to methodologies of identity theory, performance studies, history, art history, ethnomusicology, critical race theory, and phenomenology to analyze the people, places, and events that are perceived and made intelligible through notions of Blackness in Latin America. Additionally, this class will attend to how notions of class, gender, and sexuality entangle with those of race and ethnicity in daily practices. Students will develop a critical understanding of the ways in which materiality grounds and circulates discourses of Blackness historically -- either in the body, in practice, or in notions of transcendent subjecthood/being.