Description
Book Synopsis‘Shuttles in the Rocking Loom’: Mapping the Black Diaspora in African American and Caribbean Fiction explores the symbolic geographies found within modern black fiction and identifies a significant set of relations between these geographies and communal affiliations, identity politics, and understandings of a diasporic past. Employing a pliant sense of the term ‘mapping’, it offers analysis of diverse sites, landscapes, journeys, and orientations that address diasporan historical experience and often expose oppressive spatial orders or revise colonial representations. A comparative approach encompasses Anglo- and Francophone novels emergent from North America, the Caribbean, and Europe and spanning the twentieth century. The study draws on postcolonial theories of the transnational, cross-cultural formations initiated by racial slavery, while shaping its own geographical focus. In particular, spatialised aspects within the work of Édouard Glissant and Paul Gilroy provide departure points for new investigation into the prominence of space and place in a powerful black diaspora imaginary. Not only are resistant counter geographies charted but attention to narrative poetics also reveals distinctive mappings of interrelation between the temporal and spatial in diasporic fiction. Chapters examine the meanings of the US North and South; Caribbean definitions of both the plantation and anti-plantation locations; engagements with the Atlantic Middle Passage and other oceanic trajectories; and plotting of stratifications, transformative interactions, and the search for belonging in the diasporic city. Converging geographical visions in African American and Caribbean fiction are found to articulate dislocation and traversal but also connection and emplacement.
Trade ReviewTerry’s study is effectively organized, clearly signposting each theme throughout....of interest to scholars of Caribbean literature.
Melanie A. Murray, Journal of Postcolonial WritingWhat Terry shows throughout this book is the way that African diasporic resilience, surviving the trauma, ultimately reveals enmeshed histories that often aptly explicate the journeys made. The importance of remaking histories to many of these narratives is something to which she constantly returns.
Alan Rice, New West Indian GuideTable of Contents
- Publisher acknowledgements
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The Legacies of Slavery and the US North and South
- David Bradley, Octavia Butler, W. E. B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison,
- Pauline E. Hopkins, Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, Alice Walker
- 2 Landscapes of the Caribbean Plantation and Interior
- Maryse Condé, Édouard Glissant, Wilson Harris, Jamaica
- Kincaid, Earl Lovelace, Paule Marshall, Jacques Roumain
- 3 Sea Changes: Middle Passages and Voyages ‘Home’
- Maryse Condé, Charles Johnson, George Lamming, Paule
- Marshall, Toni Morrison, Caryl Phillips, Simone Schwarz-Bart,
- John Edgar Wideman
- 4 City Space: Claims, Cosmopolitanisms and Dwelling
- Dionne Brand, Patrick Chamoiseau, C. L. R. James, Nella
- Larsen, Andrea Levy, Claude McKay, John Edgar Wideman
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
