Commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of Paul Gilroy’s seminal text, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, this book offers fresh interpretations of established black Atlantic scholarship from the perspective of those typically elided from its ideological purview and existential narrative. The application of queer and/or feminist lenses in each essay attempts to mediate these elisions and to advance potentially transformative, democratising readings of the black Atlantic from both complex and complicating African and diasporic viewpoints. With the aim of realigning black Atlantic scholarship in this way, the edited volume proposes an interventionist approach that is concerned with problematizing ethnic/ cultural universalisms and challenging geographic and gendered hierarchizations. Underlining the importance of aesthetic and creative cultural archives, Reframing the Black Atlantic’s focus on transnational African diasporic literature and other intersecting popular cultural forms probes the (imaginative) limits and possibilities of the black Atlantic, conventionally conceived. To this end, this book intends not just to complicate and enhance established views of black Africa; inviting the reader to locate and perceive black life lived otherwise, it points towards more inclusive and expansive global understandings and visions of blackness. This volume will be of particular use to researchers and students in the fields of race/gender, diaspora/transnational, literary and cultural studies. The chapters of this book were originally published in Cultural Studies.

Exploring the intersections of digital humanities and African diaspora studies How can scholars use digital tools to better understand the African diaspora across time, space, and disciplines? And how can African diaspora studies inform the practices of digital humanities? These questions are at the heart of this timely collection of essays about the relationship between digital humanities and Black Atlantic studies, offering critical insights into race, migration, media, and scholarly knowledge production. The Digital Black Atlantic spans the African diaspora’s range—from Africa to North America, Europe, and the Caribbean—while its essayists span academic fields—from history and literary studies to musicology, game studies, and library and information studies. This transnational and interdisciplinary breadth is complemented by essays that focus on specific sites and digital humanities projects throughout the Black Atlantic. Covering key debates, The Digital Black Atlantic asks theoretical and practical questions about the ways that researchers and teachers of the African diaspora negotiate digital methods to explore a broad range of cultural forms including social media, open access libraries, digital music production, and video games. The volume further highlights contributions of African diaspora studies to digital humanities, such as politics and representation, power and authorship, the ephemerality of memory, and the vestiges of colonialist ideologies. Grounded in contemporary theory and praxis, The Digital Black Atlantic puts the digital humanities into conversation with African diaspora studies in crucial ways that advance both. Contributors: Alexandrina Agloro, Arizona State U; Abdul Alkalimat; Suzan Alteri, U of Florida; Paul Barrett, U of Guelph; Sayan Bhattacharyya, Singapore U of Technology and Design; Agata Błoch, Institute of History of Polish Academy of Sciences; Michał Bojanowski, Kozminski U; Sonya Donaldson, New Jersey City U; Anne Donlon; Laurent Dubois, Duke U; Amy E. Earhart, Texas A&M U; Schuyler Esprit, U of the West Indies; Demival Vasques Filho, U of Auckland, New Zealand; David Kirkland Garner; Alex Gil, Columbia U; Kaiama L. Glover, Barnard College, Columbia U; D. Fox Harrell, MIT; Hélène Huet, U of Florida; Mary Caton Lingold, Virginia Commonwealth U; Angel David Nieves, San Diego State U; Danielle Olson, MIT; Tunde Opeibi (Ope-Davies), U of Lagos, Nigeria; Jamila Moore Pewu, California State U, Fullerton; Anne Rice, Lehman College, CUNY; Sercan Şengün, Northeastern U; Janneken Smucker, West Chester U; Laurie N.Taylor, U of Florida; Toniesha L. Taylor, Texas Southern U.

Focusing on everyday rituals, the essays in this volume look at spheres of social action and the places throughout the Atlantic world where African–descended communities have expressed their values, ideas, beliefs, and spirituality in material terms. The contributors trace the impact of encounters with the Atlantic world on African cultural formation, how entanglement with commerce, commodification, and enslavement and with colonialism, emancipation, and self-rule manifested itself in the shaping of ritual acts such as those associated with birth, death, healing, and protection. Taken as a whole, the book offers new perspectives on what the materials of rituals can tell us about the intimate processes of cultural transformation and the dynamics of the human condition.

This book's discussion of skin bleaching, lightening and toning in Black Atlantic zones disengages with the usual tropes of Black Nationalism and global white supremacy such as 'the desire to be white', 'low self-esteem' and 'self-hatred' and instead engages with the global multi-billion dollar market in lighter skins with products from local cosmetic and pharmaceutical companies and entrepreneurs. This practice can be for short-term strategic purposes and the production of bleached lightness and new subjectivities through skin shades across Black Atlantic zones - the UK, USA, Caribbean, Latin America and the Africa continent- is also a simultaneous critique of continuing pigmentocracy and darker skin disadvantage. This book seeks to decolonize skin bleaching, lightening and toning by exploring its racialized gender political and libidinal economies in the Black Atlantic. In so doing it moves past the notion that global white supremacy dynamizes the practice to a position where the interaction of colourism and 'post-race' neo-liberal racialization aesthetics becomes the focus.

Winner of the 2013 Modern Language Association's William Sanders Scarborough Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Study of Black American Literature In this comparative study of contemporary Black Atlantic women writers, Samantha Pinto demonstrates the crucial role of aesthetics in defining the relationship between race, gender, and location. Thinking beyond national identity to include African, African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Black British literature, Difficult Diasporas brings together an innovative archive of twentieth-century texts marked by their break with conventional literary structures. These understudied resources mix genres, as in the memoir/ethnography/travel narrative Tell My Horse by Zora Neale Hurston, and eschew linear narratives, as illustrated in the book-length, non-narrative poem by M. Nourbese Philip, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks. Such an aesthetics, which protests against stable categories and fixed divisions, both reveals and obscures that which it seeks to represent: the experiences of Black women writers in the African Diaspora. Drawing on postcolonial and feminist scholarship in her study of authors such as Jackie Kay, Elizabeth Alexander, Erna Brodber, Ama Ata Aidoo, among others, Pinto argues for the critical importance of cultural form and demands that we resist the impulse to prioritize traditional notions of geographic boundaries. Locating correspondences between seemingly disparate times and places, and across genres, Pinto fully engages the unique possibilities of literature and culture to redefine race and gender studies.

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. In the history of African diaspora literature, black writers and intellectuals have led the way for an analysis of the archive, querying dominant archives and revising the ways black people have been represented in the legal and hegemonic discourses of the west. Their work in genres as diverse as autobiography, essay, bibliography, poetry, and the novel attests to the centrality of this critique in black intellectual culture. Through literary engagement with the archives of the slave trader, colonizer, and courtroom, creative writers teach us to read the archives of history anew, probing between the documents for stories left untold, questions left unanswered, and freedoms enacted against all odds. Opening new perspectives on Atlantic history and culture, Walters generates a dialogue between what was and what might have been. Ultimately, Walters argues that references to archival documents in black historical literature introduce a new methodology for studying both the archive and literature itself, engaging in a transnational and interdisciplinary reading that exposes the instability of the archive's truth claim and highlights rebellious possibility.

In The Briny South Nienke Boer examines the legal and literary narratives of enslaved, indentured, and imprisoned individuals crossing the Indian Ocean to analyze the formation of racialized identities in the imperial world. Drawing on court records, ledgers, pamphlets, censors’ reports, newsletters, folk songs, memoirs, and South African and South Asian works of fiction and autobiography, Boer theorizes the role of sentiment and the depiction of emotions in the construction of identities of displaced peoples across the Indian Ocean. From Dutch East India Company rule in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to early apartheid South Africa, Boer shows how colonial powers and settler states mediated and manipulated subaltern expressions of emotion as a way to silence racialized subjects and portray them as inarticulately suffering. In this way, sentiment operated in favor of the powerful rather than as an oppositional weapon of the subaltern. By tracing the entwinement of displacement, race, and sentiment, Boer frames the Indian Ocean as a site of subjectification with a long history of transnational connection—and exploitation.