from Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature
by Yogita Goyal
Next to Ngugi wa Thiong'o's chapters on Globalectics, Goyal's introduction to Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature is my favourite reading so far in the term. I really enjoyed her evaluation of the "back-to-Africa" movement and Fanon's involvement in the Third World liberation movement. The look at the practical versus prophetic aspect of these movements really brought the the forefront the Romantic visions of Garvey's activism (2-3), which promised at "once both utopia and apocalypse" (3). Fanon on the other hand was rooted in realism, as he refused to "accept any romance of past greatness, any notion of a mystical black being" and turned to logic, rationality, and social justice (5). I think this idea intersects very nicely with Ngugi's notion of globalectics because Fanon didn't desire a "return," but rather an internationalism.
Goyal looks at how diaspora collapses "time and space" which is "impossible to represent within a realist framework" (23-4). I think that this is a fair assessment because diaspora causes people to live in a liminal space culturally and often emotionally.
I would love to read the rest of Goyal's book because I'm interested in the pervading Romanticism that has stayed part of literature and rhetoric and also how people work against these notions. She discusses the importance of treating literary style politically (14), which is what I am working on for my Honours thesis in a completely different literary movement.
Interesting Passages:
"... it is helpful to recall Benjamin's theory of of history as a catastrophe, a notion that permeates black Atlantic literature, countering the Enlightenment notion of history as progress" (15).
"To accomplish this redemptive task, the storyteller creates images that fuse past and present, images that make visible that which has been left out and must now be reclaimed. These dialectic images confront the experience of the past with the reality of the now, and momentarily achieve a halt in the progress of history" (15).