Returns to Africa
Diasporic Artistic Practices and the Memory of Slavery
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22064648 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Androula Michael (0009-0003-6936-8305, Université de Picardie Jules Verne, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 20 |
| Publication date | 2025-01-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Angles (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2274-2042 • E-ISSN: 2274-2042 |
| Publisher | OpenEdition (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.4000/159ou |
| OpenAlex | W4416949166 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 11 |
This article examines contemporary forms of “returns to Africa” in African American artistic practices, beyond nostalgic or essentialist perspectives. Through the works of Kara Walker, Nona Faustine, and Nick Cave, it analyzes how the memory of Africa and the history of slavery become critical resources for thinking about the present. These artists engage with absences, erased traces, and the legacies of colonial violence not to restore a lost origin, but to re-inscribe Black bodies, stories, and gestures within contemporary spaces marked by inequalities and structural racism inherited from the history of slavery. Here, the “return” becomes a performative and creative act, a tool for active memory and resistance, where Africa is less a geographical place than a symbolic space of struggle, reinvention, and creation
Colonialism · Essentialism · Gesture · Inequality · Performative utterance · Racism · Subjectivity · The Symbolic · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies
| Highly cited | No |
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