1st Edition

Archives of the Black Atlantic Reading Between Literature and History

By Wendy W. Walters Copyright 2013
204 Pages
by Routledge

204 Pages
by Routledge

204 Pages
by Routledge

Many African diasporic novelists and poets allude to or cite archival documents in their writings, foregrounding the elements of archival research and data in their literary texts, and revising the material remnants of the archive. This book reads black historical novels and poetry in an interdisciplinary context, to examine the multiple archives that have produced our historical consciousness.... Read more

Introduction: Black Historical Literature and the Archive Part I: Diaries, Letters, and Scrapbooks: Archives of the Everyday 1. Fiction and Documents: Patricia Powell’s The Pagoda 2. Archives of Anthropology and Psychoanalysis: V.Y. Mudimbe’s The Rift 3. Prison or Paradise? Archiving the Black American West in Toni Morrison’s Paradise Part II: Reading Rebellion: The Archives of the Slave Trade 4. Elizabeth Alexander’s "Amistad": Reading the Black History Poem through the Archive 5. "Object Into Subject": Michelle Cliff, John Ruskin, and The Slaveship 6. The Spectral Ledger: Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts 7. Reading the Archive, Looking for Bones Epilogue: Toward an Aspirational Archive

Biography

Wendy W. Walters is Associate Professor of Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College, US.

"Walters’ rigorous readings between literature, socio-political history, and legal documents convincingly demonstrate that Afro-diasporic literary expression can contest the archival over-determination of Black subjects through histories of racism and colonial violence, and alter our understanding of socio-political worlds." - Ania Kowalik, Emory University, Archive Journal