African-Caribbean Connections

Session Submission Type: Panel

Description for Program

This panel aims to explore the manifold ways in which cultural currents of the African diaspora have flowed within the Atlantic World. Examining subjects as wide ranging as the encounters of Antillean and Senegalese évolués in France in the early 20th century, the discernible presence of a valorized “Africanness” in C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins , the influence of Caribbean literature on Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s foundational anglophone African novels, or the surprising continuities between the fictional “return” to Africa captured by the Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé and the nonfictional account of Ghanaian poet Kowi Afoonor’s travels in the Caribbean, the panel’s papers exemplify the enriching (and often surprising) interconnectivity and reciprocity that undergirds relations between the people of continental Africa and those occupying the far-flung islands of the Caribbean Sea. It particularly engages the conference subfields of Black (un)Freedoms and Maritime Cultural Landscapes.

Sub Unit

• ASWAD

Chair

• J. Dillon Brown, Washington University in St. Louis

Individual Presentations

• African Presences in C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins - Xavier Lee, University of California Davis

• A Hundred Years of Emancipation Across Waters: Reflections from Antillean and Senegalese Évolués - A. Veronique Charles, Columbia University

• The Caribbean Presence in African Literature - J. Dillon Brown, Washington University in St. Louis

• Plotting Peripheral Identity: (Geo)Political Entanglements in the Work of Marsye Condé and Kofi Awoonor - Akua Banful, UC Davis