Afrodiasporic Forms - by Raquel Kennon (Paperback)

About the Book

"In Afrodiasporic Forms, Raquel Kennon provides an interdisciplinary, transnational literary and cultural study of modern racialized slavery. Blending close readings with cultural criticism that focuses on products of slavery's afterlife-poetry, prose, plays, painting, telenovelas, sculpture, photography, and more-this innovative work opens up cross-cultural conversations about how imaginative uses of the past inform understandings of the African diaspora. Chapters analyze divergent texts and artistic forms engaging slavery's memory spanning from the 1830s to the twenty-first century and ranging across genres and geographies to trace contradictions, ambiguities, and contestations within diasporic narratologies of slavery. With its comparative readings of global genres, subgenres, and cultural modes, Afrodiasporic Forms unsettles dominant, US-centered, Anglophone narratives and refuses a definitive or singularly authoritative narrative of slavery. Kennon's analysis traverses geographies and spatiotemporalities to focus on how transnational sites of slavery are reimagined in and through texts over time, as processes of remembering and forgetting reconfigure these images and spaces. As a work of comparative slavery studies, Afrodiasporic Forms: Slavery in Literature and Culture of the African Diaspora brings into crisis the very expectation of coherence and linearity in a global economic stratagem marked by concealment, discontinuity, and rupture"--

Book Synopsis

Afrodiasporic Forms explores the epistemological possibilities of the "Black world" paradigm and traces a literary and cultural cartography of the monde noir and its constitutive African diasporas across multiple poetic, visual, and cultural permutations. Examining the transatlantic slave trade and modern racial slavery, Raquel Kennon challenges the US-centric focus of slavery studies and draws on a transnational, eclectic archive of materials from Lusophone, Hispanophone, and Anglophone sources in the Americas to inspect evolving, multitudinous, and disparate forms of Afrodiasporic cultural expression.

Spanning the 1830s to the twenty-first century, Afrodiasporic Forms traverses national, linguistic, and disciplinary boundaries as it investigates how cultural products of slavery's afterlife--including poetry, prose, painting, television, sculpture, and song--shape understandings of the African diaspora. Each chapter uncovers multidirectional pathways for exploring representations of slavery, considering works such as a Brazilian telenovela based on Bernardo Guimarães's novel A Escrava Isaura, Robert Hayden's poem "Middle Passage," Kara Walker's sculpture A Subtlety, and Juan Francisco Manzano's Autobiografía de un esclavo. Kennon's expansive method of comparative reading across the diaspora uses eclectic pairings of canonical and popular textual and artistic sources to stretch beyond disciplinary and national borders, promoting expansive diasporic literacies.

Review Quotes

"The power of this critical study that maps the Black world is its global lens and Raquel Kennon's command of genre. The telenovela, art, fiction, poetry, the enslavement narrative, and song, arranged to offer glimpses of Brazil, the United States, and Cuba, give us a wonderful new starting point from which to engage with the diasporic dimensions of enslavement and its memorialization in comparative contexts. The subtext of the sugar motif, which Kennon extrapolates from the historiography on the enslavement trade yet repurposes to reveal new agency, anchors her original ideas to important memories of the past. She leaves us with a new discursive path to follow, one dotted with updated critical landmarks."

--Christel N. Temple, professor of Africana studies at the University of Pittsburgh and author of Black Cultural Mythology

About the Author

Raquel Kennon is associate professor in the Department of Africana Studies at California State University, Northridge.