“Soul to Soul”

Drawing on the metaphor of echo-location, this chapter considers the ‘Black Atlantic’ as constituted by the historical and memorializing narratives of the Middle Passage. The chapter discusses how Aidoo, Anyidoho and.Opoku-Agyemang engage with African Americans residing in/visiting Ghana and address traumatic legacies of slavery. The chapter compares the vision of diaspora in work by these Ghanaian writers with the documentary of Soul to Soul, a 1971 collaborative performance in Accra by Tina Turner, Roberta Flack and others, and non-fiction works by African Americans including Maya Angelou and Saidiya Hartman. This chapter considers how documentaries, sound recording/reproduction, echo, and commemorative poetry exist on a continuum that gives rise to a theory of memory and its limits when confronting historical loss.

Art · Art history · Diaspora · Literature · Metaphor · Narrative · Poetry · Sociology · Soul · Theology · Visual arts · African history and culture studies · Anthropology · Gender Studies · History · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies