Re-membering the Black Atlantic
Re-membering the Black Atlantic

Author: Lars Eckstein

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9042019581

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The Atlantic slave trade continues to haunt the cultural memories of Africa, Europe and the Americas. There is a prevailing desire to forget: While victims of the African diaspora tried to flee the sites of trauma, enlightened Westerners preferred to be oblivious to the discomforting complicity between their enlightenment and chattel slavery. Recently, however, fiction writers have ventured to 're-member' the Black Atlantic. This book is concerned with how literature performs as memory. It sets out to chart systematically the ways in which literature and memory intersect, and offers readings of three seminal Black Atlantic novels. Each reading illustrates a particular poetic strategy of accessing the past and presents a distinct political outlook on memory. Novelists may choose to write back to texts, images or music: Caryl Phillips's Cambridge brings together numerous fragments of slave narratives, travelogues and histories to shape a brilliant montage of long-forgotten texts. David Dabydeen's A Harlot's Progress approaches slavery through the gateway of paintings by William Hogarth, Sir Joshua Reynolds and J.M.W. Turner. Toni Morrison's Beloved, finally, is steeped in black music, from spirituals and blues to the art of John Coltrane. Beyond differences in poetic strategy, moreover, the novels paradigmatically reveal distinct ideologies: their politics of memory variously promote an encompassing transcultural sense of responsibility, an aestheticist 'creative amnesia', and the need to preserve a collective 'black' identity.

Activating the Past
Activating the Past

Author: Andrew Apter

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2009-12-14

Total Pages: 470

ISBN-13: 1443817902

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Activating the Past explores critical historical events and transformations associated with embodied memories in the Black Atlantic world. The assembled case-studies disclose hidden historical references to local and regional encounters with Atlantic modernity, focusing on religious festivals that represent political and economic relationships in “fetishized” forms of power and value. Although memories of the slave trade are rarely acknowledged in West Africa and the Americas, they have retreated, so to speak, within ritual associations as restricted, repressed, even secret histories that are activated during public festivals and through different styles of spirit possession. In West Africa, our focus on selected port cities along the coast extends into the hinterlands, where slave raiding occurred but is poorly documented and rarely acknowledged. In the Caribbean, regional contrasts between coastal and hinterland communities relate figures of the jíbaro, the indio and the caboclo to their ritual representations in Santería, Vodou, and Candomblé. Highlighting the spatial association of memories with shrines and the ritual “condensation” of regional geographies, we locate local spirits and domestic terrains within co-extensive Atlantic horizons. The volume brings together leading scholars of the African Diaspora who not only explore these ritual archives for significant echoes of the past, but also illuminate a subaltern historiography embedded within Atlantic cultural systems.

Biography and the Black Atlantic
Biography and the Black Atlantic

Author: Lisa A. Lindsay

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0812245466

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In this volume, leading historians reflect on the recent biographical turn in studies of slavery and the modern African diaspora. This collection presents vivid glimpses into the lives of remarkable enslaved and formerly enslaved people who moved, struggled, and endured in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic world.

Transatlantic Memories of Slavery: Remembering the Past, Changing the Future
Transatlantic Memories of Slavery: Remembering the Past, Changing the Future

Author: Elisa Bordin

Publisher: Cambria Press

Published: 2015-08-10

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1621967522

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While the memorialization of slavery has generated an impressive number of publications, relatively few studies deal with this subject from a transnational, transdisciplinary and transracial standpoint. As a historical phenomenon that crossed borders and traversed national communities and ethnic groups producing alliances that did not overlap with received identities, slavery as well as its memory call for comparative investigations that may bring to light aspects obscured by the predominant visibility of US-American and British narratives of the past. This study addresses the memory of slavery from a transnational perspective. It brings into dialogue texts and practices from the transatlantic world, offering comparative analyses which interlace the variety of memories emerging in diverse national contexts and fields of study and shed light on the ways local countermemories have interacted with and responded to hegemonic narratives of slavery. The inclusion of Brazil and the French, English, and Spanish Caribbean alongside the United States and Europe, and the variety of investigative approaches-ranging from cinema, popular culture and visual culture studies to anthropology and literary studies-expand the current understanding of the slave past and how it is reimagined today. This fascinating book brings freshness to the topic by considering objects of investigation which have so far remained marginal in the academic debate, such as heroic memorials, civic landscape, white family sagas, Young Adult literature of slavery, Latin American telenovelas and filmic narrations within and beyond Hollywood. What emerges is a multifarious set of memories, which keep changing according to generation, race, gender, nation and political urgency and indicate the advancing of a dynamic, mobilized memorialization of slavery willing to move beyond mourning towards a more militant stand for justice. This is an important book for those interested in African American, American, and Latin American studies and working across literature, cinema, visual arts, and public culture. It will also be useful to public official and civil servants interested in the question of slavery and its present memory.

Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction
Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction

Author: Keith Byerman

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2006-05-18

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 080787678X

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With close readings of more than twenty novels by writers including Ernest Gaines, Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, Gloria Naylor, and John Edgar Wideman, Keith Byerman examines the trend among African American novelists of the late twentieth century to write about black history rather than about their own present. Employing cultural criticism and trauma theory, Byerman frames these works as survivor narratives that rewrite the grand American narrative of individual achievement and the march of democracy. The choice to write historical narratives, he says, must be understood historically. These writers earned widespread recognition for their writing in the 1980s, a period of African American commercial success, as well as the economic decline of the black working class and an increase in black-on-black crime. Byerman contends that a shared experience of suffering joins African American individuals in a group identity, and writing about the past serves as an act of resistance against essentialist ideas of black experience shaping the cultural discourse of the present. Byerman demonstrates that these novels disrupt the temptation in American society to engage history only to limit its significance or to crown successful individuals while forgetting the victims.

The Arts of Memory and the Poetics of Remembering
The Arts of Memory and the Poetics of Remembering

Author: Abbes Maazaoui

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2016-08-17

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 1443899186

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The Arts of Memory and the Poetics of Remembering This collection of essays explores the dynamics of representation, transmission and circulation of memory, as well as the role of personal and collective memory in shaping meanings, values, attitudes and identities. Bringing together a group of international scholars from different disciplines, the book examines various literary, artistic, psychological, social, historical and political narratives, ranging from British women’s elegies of the First World War to the Brooklyn Dodgers to the constructed narratives of Lincoln University’s founding ideals to photographs of the Holocaust and Nazi Camp testimonies. Among the key features of the book’s approach is its focus on memory, not as a static entity, but as a set of malleable patterns and strategies that highlight both the unity of the concept of memory and the diversity of its human expressions and artistic forms.

Remembering Slavery
Remembering Slavery

Author: Marc Favreau

Publisher: New Press, The

Published: 2021-09-07

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 1620970449

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The groundbreaking, bestselling history of slavery, with a new foreword by Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed With the publication of the 1619 Project and the national reckoning over racial inequality, the story of slavery has gripped America’s imagination—and conscience—once again. No group of people better understood the power of slavery’s legacies than the last generation of American people who had lived as slaves. Little-known before the first publication of Remembering Slavery over two decades ago, their memories were recorded on paper, and in some cases on primitive recording devices, by WPA workers in the 1930s. A major publishing event, Remembering Slavery captured these extraordinary voices in a single volume for the first time, presenting them as an unprecedented, first-person history of slavery in America. Remembering Slavery received the kind of commercial attention seldom accorded projects of this nature—nationwide reviews as well as extensive coverage on prime-time television, including Good Morning America, Nightline, CBS Sunday Morning, and CNN. Reviewers called the book “chilling . . . [and] riveting” (Publishers Weekly) and “something, truly, truly new” (The Village Voice). With a new foreword by Pulitzer Prize–winning scholar Annette Gordon-Reed, this new edition of Remembering Slavery is an essential text for anyone seeking to understand one of the most basic and essential chapters in our collective history.

Creating Memorials, Building Identities
Creating Memorials, Building Identities

Author: Alan Rice

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2011-11-01

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1846317592

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This incisive book investigates memorials to slavery throughout the African diaspora, with an emphasis on Europe. It analyzes not only the increasing number of physical monuments but also the practice of remembering—and forgetting—in museums and plantation houses as well as in contemporary cultural forms like the visual arts, literature, music, and film. A series of case studies ranging from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, from Senegal and Montserrat to Manchester and Paris, explores issues such as the Lancashire cotton famine, black soldiers in World War II, and the 2007 commemoration of abolition in regional museums.

Transatlantic Memories of Slavery: Remembering the Past, Changing the Future - Student Edition
Transatlantic Memories of Slavery: Remembering the Past, Changing the Future - Student Edition

Author: Elisa Bordin

Publisher: Cambria Press

Published: 2015-07-26

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13:

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Note: this is an abridged version of the book with references removed. The complete edition is also available. While the memorialization of slavery has generated an impressive number of publications, relatively few studies deal with this subject from a transnational, transdisciplinary and transracial standpoint. As a historical phenomenon that crossed borders and traversed national communities and ethnic groups producing alliances that did not overlap with received identities, slavery as well as its memory call for comparative investigations that may bring to light aspects obscured by the predominant visibility of US-American and British narratives of the past. This study addresses the memory of slavery from a transnational perspective. It brings into dialogue texts and practices from the transatlantic world, offering comparative analyses which interlace the variety of memories emerging in diverse national contexts and fields of study and shed light on the ways local countermemories have interacted with and responded to hegemonic narratives of slavery. The inclusion of Brazil and the French, English, and Spanish Caribbean alongside the United States and Europe, and the variety of investigative approaches-ranging from cinema, popular culture and visual culture studies to anthropology and literary studies-expand the current understanding of the slave past and how it is reimagined today. This fascinating book brings freshness to the topic by considering objects of investigation which have so far remained marginal in the academic debate, such as heroic memorials, civic landscape, white family sagas, Young Adult literature of slavery, Latin American telenovelas and filmic narrations within and beyond Hollywood. What emerges is a multifarious set of memories, which keep changing according to generation, race, gender, nation and political urgency and indicate the advancing of a dynamic, mobilized memorialization of slavery willing to move beyond mourning towards a more militant stand for justice. This is an important book for those interested in African American, American, and Latin American studies and working across literature, cinema, visual arts, and public culture. It will also be useful to public official and civil servants interested in the question of slavery and its present memory.

The Sephardic Atlantic
The Sephardic Atlantic

Author: Sina Rauschenbach

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-04-09

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 3319991965

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This volume contributes to the growing field of Early Modern Jewish Atlantic History, while stimulating new discussions at the interface between Jewish Studies and Postcolonial Studies. It is a collection of substantive, sophisticated and variegated essays, combining case studies with theoretical reflections, organized into three sections: race and blood, metropoles and colonies, and history and memory. Twelve chapters treat converso slave traders, race and early Afro-Portuguese relations in West Africa, Sephardim and people of color in nineteenth-century Curaçao, Portuguese converso/Sephardic imperialist behavior, Caspar Barlaeus’ attitude toward Jews in the Sephardic Atlantic, Jewish-Creole historiography in eighteenth-century Suriname, Savannah’s eighteenth-century Sephardic community in an Altantic setting, Freemasonry and Sephardim in the British Empire, the figure of Columbus in popular literature about the Caribbean, key works of Caribbean postcolonial literature on Sephardim, the holocaust, slavery and race, Canadian Jewish identity in the reception history of Esther Brandeau/Jacques La Fargue and Moroccan-Jewish memories of a sixteenth-century Portuguese military defeat.