Imagining Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Works of African Writers
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23454947 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Cheryl Sterling (0000-0002-6649-8222, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Pages | 110-124 |
| Publication date | 2025-11-13 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | CHAPTER |
| Venue | African Literature in Transition : Volume 1 (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1017/9781009662376.010 |
| OpenAlex | W4415717013 |
| ISBN | 9781009662376 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 6 |
Writers in African literature who address the thematic of transatlantic slavery either write historical narratives, mythic narratives, or “narratives of return” to an imagined homeland. The literature explored in this chapter include The Moor’s Account (2014) by Laila Lalami and A gloriosa família: o tempo dos flamengos (1997) by Pepetela, who fictionalize the earliest period of the trade. Two Thousand Season s (1973) by Ayi Kwei Armah, Season of the Shadow (2013) by Leonora Miano, and the play Slave (1981) by Mohammed Ben-Abdallah mythically revision the past. A play like Dilemma of a Ghost (1965) by Ama Ata Aidoo and the novels Comes the Voyager at Last by Kofi Awoonor (1992) and Call Me by My Rightful Name (2004) by Isidore Okpewho, as narratives of return, focus on diasporic subjectivity. These texts, this chapter further argues, exemplify an “embodied archive” where the past and present and the ancestral and psychical bond entwine in bodily, experiential memory seen in how the characters approach common thematics such as African collusion in the slave trade intertwined with the colonial encounter, resistance to domination, diasporic subjectivity in relation to Africa, and the formation of Pan-African unity.
Colonialism · Government (linguistics) · Narrative · Negotiation · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies
| Highly cited | No |
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