Afrodiasporic Forms

Slavery in Literature and Culture of the African Diaspora

Raquel Kennon

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9780807177648
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Afrodiasporic Forms explores the epistemological possibilities of the "Black world" paradigm and traces a literary and cultural cartography of the monde noir and its constitutive African diasporas across multiple poetic, visual, and cultural permutations. Examining the transatlantic slave trade and modern racial slavery, Raquel Kennon challenges the US-centric focus of slavery studies and draws on a transnational, eclectic archive of materials from Lusophone, Hispanophone, and Anglophone sources in the Americas to inspect evolving, multitudinous, and disparate forms of Afrodiasporic cultural expression.Spanning the 1830s to the twenty-first century, Afrodiasporic Forms traverses national, linguistic, and disciplinary boundaries as it investigates how cultural products of slavery's afterlife—including poetry, prose, painting, television, sculpture, and song—shape understandings of the African diaspora. Each chapter uncovers multidirectional pathways for exploring representations of slavery, considering works such as a Brazilian telenovela based on Bernardo Guimarães's novel A Escrava Isaura, Robert Hayden's poem "Middle Passage, " Kara Walker's sculpture A Subtlety, and Juan Francisco Manzano's Autobiografía de un esclavo. Kennon's expansive method of comparative reading across the diaspora uses eclectic pairings of canonical and popular textual and artistic sources to stretch beyond disciplinary and national borders, promoting expansive diasporic literacies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION. Traveling Through Fog: Slavery’s Memorial Expressions in the Black World
• 1 White Skin, Black Slavery: Bernardo Guimarães’s A Escrava Isaura and the Global Telenovela
• 2 Subtle Resistance: On Sugar and the Mammy Figure in Kara Walker’s A Subtlety and Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
• 3 Black Flesh After Flame: Lynching, Resistance, and the Legacy of Slavery in the Poetry of Jean Toomer and Robert Hayden
• 4 Os Laços de Lembrança e Esquecimento: Reading Pelourinho, Castro Alves’s “O navio negreiro,” Carolina Maria de Jesus’s Quarto de Despejo, and Postslavery Brazilian Literature
• 5 Azúcar, (Auto)biografía, and Absence: Juan Francisco Manzano, Esteban Montejo, and the Cuban Poetics of Slavery
• EPILOGUE. A Gate of Return: Toward an Infinite Sum of Afrodiasporic Forms
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX
• Illustrations