Writing the Black Diasporic City in the Age of Globalization

Carol Bailey

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781978829664, 9781978829671
• eBook ISBN: 9781978829688
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

Writing the Black Diasporic City in the Age of Globalization theorizes the city as a generative, "semicircular" social space, where the changes of globalization are most profoundly experienced. The fictive accounts analyzed here configure cities as spaces where movement is simultaneously restrictive and liberating, and where life prospects are at once promising and daunting. In their depictions of the urban experiences of peoples of African descent, writers and other creative artists offer a complex set of renditions of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Black urban citizens' experience in European or Euro-dominated cities such as Boston, London, New York, and Toronto, as well as Global South cities such as Accra, Kingston, and Lagos—that emerged out of colonial domination, and which have emerged as hubs of current globalization. Writing the Black Diasporic City draws on critical tools of classical postcolonial studies as well as those of globalization studies to read works by Ama Ata Aidoo, Amma Darko, Marlon James, Cecil Foster, Zadie Smith, Michael Thomas, Chika Unigwe, and other contemporary writers. The book also engages the television series Call the Midwife, the Canada carnival celebration Caribana, and the film series Small Axe to show how cities are characterized as open, complicated spaces that are constantly shifting. Cities collapse boundaries, allowing for both haunting and healing, and they can sever the connection from kin and community, or create new connections.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. “Natty Dread Rise Again”: The Haunting City and the Promise of Diaspora in Man Gone Down
• 2. “Putting the Best Outside”: A Genealogy of Self-Fashioning in Call the Midwife and NW
• 3. The Transnational Semicircle and the “Mobile” Female Subject in Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon and Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters Street
• 4. “Writing the Sprawling City”: The Transatlantic Drug Trade in A Brief History of Seven Killings
• 5. A Door Ajar: Reading and Writing Toronto in Cecil Foster’s Sleep On, Beloved
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• About the Author