Plotting Peripheral Identity: (Geo)Political Entanglements in the Work of Marsye Condé and Kofi Awoonor

• In Event: African-Caribbean Connections

Description for Program

Black diasporic narratives of return to Africa frequently move from imperial metropoles to formerly colonized peripheries, mapping these journeys along a trajectory that moves between Africa, Europe, and North America. Different routes of travel, that move from periphery to periphery, between Africa and the Caribbean, and vice versa, complicate quests for identity, connection, and solidarity by confronting them with the realities of (geo)politics. In this talk, I discuss the personal and political modes of discovery that are revealed through readings of Maryse Condé’s Heremakhonon (1972), and Kofi Awoonor’s Latin American and Caribbean Notebook Vol. 1 (1992). Reading Awoonor’s poetry, written from the perspective of a Ghanaian diplomat in the Caribbean, alongside Maryse Condé’s fictional account of a Guadeloupean intellectual’s cultural and political misadventures in French West Africa, plots questions of shared identity alongside post-independence social and geopolitical realities. The circulation of African and Caribbean writers between both regions articulates a shared identity on the basis of geopolitical affinities between Africans and Caribbeans under neocolonial exploitation, even as writing from these journeys reveals the sometime fragility of historical and identity-based connections.

Author

• Akua Banful, UC Davis