The Cultural Memory of Africa in African American and Black British Fiction, 1970-2000

Specters of the Shore

Leila Kamali

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137581716
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book offers a new approach to reading the cultural memory of Africa in African American fiction from the post-Civil Rights era and in Black British fiction emerging in the wake of Thatcherism. The critical period between the decline of the Civil Rights Movement and the dawn of the twenty-first century saw a deep contrast in the distinctive narrative approaches displayed by diverse African diaspora literatures in negotiating the crisis of representing the past. Through a series of close readings of literary fiction, this work examines how the cultural memory of Africa is employed in diverse and specific negotiations of narrative time, in order to engage and shape contemporary identity and citizenship. By addressing the practice of "remembering" Africa, the book argues for the signal importance of the African diaspora's literary interventions, and locates new paradigms for cultural identity in contemporary times.

© The Author(s) 2016

Leila KamaliThe Cultural Memory of Africa in African American and Black British Fiction, 1970-2000Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict10.1057/978-1-137-58171-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Leila Kamali¹

(1)

Department of English, King’s College London, London, UK

End Abstract

This book offers a new comparative approach to late twentieth-century African American and Black British fiction, offering a detailed consideration of the treatment of the cultural memory of Africa, and reading the ways in which these literatures contribute to debates about cultural identity in the contemporary world. The cultural memory of Africa emerges as a distinctive and important theme in African American and Black British literary responses to the legacy of the Civil Rights movement and Black Power, and is equally established, I argue in this book, as an organizing principle for thinking through the possibilities for Black British identity in the wake of Thatcherism and the crumbling British Empire. The “African” iconography of the Black Power movement forms important inspiration and provocation in both cases, and approaches toward themes of “remembering” Africa present a clear contrast in narrative techniques in African American and Black British fictional contexts, which can be seen to contribute importantly to debates around a returning historical sensibility seen as characteristic of the contemporary era.

The comparative impetus that drives this book arises in no small part from the “transnational connection […] between the United States [and] Britain” and the “widely held perception during the 1960s that the two countries were on a shared trajectory with regard to race matters”. ¹ “The United States and the United Kingdom did, indeed”, Stephen Tuck writes, recalling the words of Winston Churchill, “enjoy a ‘special relationship’”—but it was “one rooted in histories of Empire, white supremacy, racial inequality, and neoliberal policies”. ² The critical period between 1970 and 2000 sees African American writers grappling with the legacies of a Civil Rights movement, which is often felt to have fallen short of its promise, and asking questions about the relationship of African and African American tradition to the contexts of the past and the present. It is a period, also, in which Black British writers explore a wide range of cultural inheritances and allegiances, looking for ways to speak of their experience in Britain, and come to establish bold and original approaches toward identity made for the present and for the future. It is a time of some uncertainty in both African American and Black British cultural politics: a moment when the optimism afforded African Americans by the triumphs of the Civil Rights movement may have lost some of its shine, ³ and when Black Britons frequently find that neither “British” nor “postcolonial” models for identity offer simple answers about what it means to be Black in Britain.

The depiction of a cultural memory of Africa is a characteristic of a great number of African American and Black British works of fiction published in the period between 1970 and 2000 by Black writers in the USA and the UK. Africa is situated in these fictions, more often than not, as a “landscape of the mind”, ⁴ an ambivalently represented space that usually says more about how cultural identity is situated in African American or Black British experience than it does about the African continent itself. In this study I show that narrative approaches toward Africa are affected, in both literary traditions, in ways which are complicated by dynamics relating to cultural imperialism, racism, and histories of multiple migrations.

The African American relationship with the cultural memory of Africa in this period occurs against the historical backdrop of various ideological forms of pan-Africanism which can be traced to the influence of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century maroon revolutions in Haiti, Jamaica, and Surinam, and to the rebellions on American soil of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner in the 1820s and 1830s. ⁵ The early twentieth century saw the establishment, by the Universal Negro Improvement Association, and its flamboyant leader Marcus Garvey, of the Black Star Line, a shipping company built with the express intention of taking African diaspora people “back to Africa”. The founding of the Nation of Islam in the 1930s coincided with, and drew upon, the resistance struggle across colonized territories in Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean, with the Nation’s emphasis upon a united struggle against imperialism with the people of what it referred to as “Afro-Asia”. Malcolm X’s departure from the Nation in 1964 occurred amid his own reformed views for the possibilities of racial harmony influenced by his travels in Africa and the Middle East, which were only beginning to shape his thinking at the time of his assassination in 1965. In the wake of Malcolm’s death, a younger generation represented by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) carried forward Malcolm’s legacy, and spawned the call “We want Black power”. The 1960s’ struggle for Civil Rights in the USA coincided with the decolonization of a number of African states, and many Black Power leaders invoked the struggles of African peoples against imperialism and neo-imperialism as vitally linked to the liberation struggle at home. ⁶

In Britain, meanwhile, following Britain’s call for colonial subjects to fill the labor shortage left at home by the war effort, the mass migration of Caribbean people to Britain was epitomized by the Empire Windrush in 1948. The 1950s gave rise to “nationalist groups across the British Empire”, displaying “distinctly more combative political methods of resistance to colonial power”, ⁷ and as first India (in 1947), then African nations, then a number of Caribbean states gained their independence from European colonial powers, decolonization did nothing to slow the flow of migrants to Britain. Immigrants to Britain did not receive the unequivocal welcome they had been led to expect, with tensions epitomized by Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968. In response to the 1971 Immigration Act, by which Commonwealth citizens lost their right of abode in the UK, photographer Neil Kenlock responds: “It was outrageous—you can’t take us from Africa, enslave us, and after we’ve built the country up after the war, tell us to go back. No. That’s not on.” ⁸ During this period, antiracist struggle in the UK was influenced by the highly visible US Black Power movement, “the British Panthers adopt[ing] the strains of Black Power made accessible through the style and communication strategies of the U.S. Panthers”, ⁹ but it was an influence that was largely unofficial and improvised. The discussion in this book is grounded against a fascinating current historiography, in which US Black Power, so long glamorized and criminalized in equal measure in the popular imagination, is only in recent years beginning to be discussed as a subject of serious historical research. While this book is not exclusively about Black Power, that movement’s cultural legacy points to significant questions about the perpetual commodification of Blackness in US contexts, and the comparative perpetual erasure of Black cultures in British history, which are at the heart of my concerns. It is salutary to note, for instance, that “U.S. civil rights demonstrations [were] staged for dramatic effect, [and that] the British media followed the action like a soap opera”, ¹⁰ while “Britain’s Black Power movement is in danger of being written out of history”. ¹¹

Histories of the term “Black British” reflect, among other things, the trajectory of a changing relationship with “Blackness” as it is defined by US culture, to a position which links that identification to an effort to represent the commonality of nonwhite experiences in Britain. Alison Donnell identifies 1970, the height of the Black Power movement in the US, as “a historical moment from which Black as an identificatory category began to establish itself within Britain”, ¹² and as Mark Stein notes, “it was deployed by the Caribbean Artists Movement in the late 1960s, a movement which, in the words of its chronicler, Anne Walmsley, ‘bridged the transformation of Britain’s West Indian Community from one of exiles and immigrants to Black British’”. ¹³ During this period, the term “Black” is described by Stuart Hall as “‘hegemonic’ over other ethnic/racial identities”, ¹⁴ and by Kobena Mercer as a moment “when various peoples—of Asian, African and Caribbean descent […] invoked a collective identity predicated on political and not biological similarities […, signalling an] alliance and solidarity among dispersed groups of people sharing common historical experiences of British racism”. ¹⁵ This movement indicates a differentiation from US influence. In the 1980s, Alison Donnell writes: “The need to acknowledge multiple perspectives and the pluralisation of cultural forms and positions within the arena of Black British culture was an almost inevitable consequence of the growth of interest and work being done in this area” “(Donnell)”. As James Procter puts it, “what Kobena Mercer refers to as ‘the burden of representation’ has created a desire to ‘say it all’”, where attempts at theorization of “Blackness” are constantly, inevitably, disrupted by a “kind of politicised, untidy, ‘lived’ version of Blackness”. ¹⁶

The shift from the 1980s to the 1990s may broadly be represented by Stuart Hall’s contention that “people don’t use ‘Black’ in quite that way any longer, because they want to identify more precisely where they come from, culturally”. ¹⁷ James Procter comments:

[The] ‘burden of representation’ lifted during the 1980s and 1990s as certain Black cultural formations became ‘centred’. […] What is also striking about the literature of this period is its new attention to the historicity of the Black British experience [,…] testimony to the fact the Black British past is not simply an amoral site of postmodern play but also a politically loaded, politically active site of remembrance from which we all must learn. ¹⁸

Where the burden of representation positioned one rarefied speaker (the artist or writer for instance) to speak on behalf of whole, disparate, and shifting communities, there is a sense of a false notion of representation being imposed upon the word spoken, a false “frozenness” upon diverse and living histories, an inevitable consequence of a culture where nonwhite is equated with “other”. When all this is taken into account, the term “Black British” is most usefully identified for me as functioning, in relation to these contemporary novels, as

a collective term that covers an imagined experiential field of overlapping territories. While at its narrowest it merely refers to writers with an African-Caribbean background, at its widest, it can include writing that takes recourse to domains such as Africa, Asia or the Caribbean and attendant cultural and aesthetic traditions. […] [the] space denoted by the label in question is far from homogenous; on the contrary, its heterogeneity is one of its defining features. ¹⁹

Despite the fact that Black British writers register an interruption (or multiple interruptions) in the transmission of historical memory, they do present the capacity of historical memory to “possess” the present in the same way that African American writers do. African American texts make a strong suggestion that this is a distinctive African trait which is felt in African American culture, through Vodoun or other traditional forms (but which can also be felt simply as “memory”). Black British texts do not link this to any particular tradition—it is figured more as simply a function of text, and reflective of histor...