The Black Atlantic

The African American revolutionary poetry outfit and purported
grandfathers of rap The Last Poets coined their name from Keorapetse
Kgositsile's poem “Towards a Walk in the Sun”. This is relatively common
knowledge. However, no sustained academic research has been
conducted on this crucial exchange in diasporic studies. In this paper, I
show how Kgositsile's poem in question harvested the rich oral, aural,
and literary practices of his native Setswana, which in turn enabled The
Last Poets to not only draw a name from Kgositsile's poetry, but also a
language and poetic. This way, I demonstrate multivalent streams of
influences between black South Africa and black America, as opposed
to the current one-way exchange in scholarship that almost always
presents black South Africans as emulators and mimickers of AfroAmerican culture. I expose how Kgositsile's poetry trans/figures both Afro-American literary and musical histories. Functioning within the
framework of pan-Africanism, I uncover black music's transatlantic
arch in Kgositsile's poetry, which unifies Africa, the Caribbean, and
black America. I offer a deep analysis of that arch, and demonstrate
its dynamic and complex networks which span generations and
centuries, and continues to be generative till today. I focus particularly
on the evolution of orality and aurality in black expressive cultures,
understood as practices that express the black cultural continuum on
both sides of the Atlantic.

Over the span of three centuries, the Afro- British tradition has managed to establish itself as a distinguished voice in Britain's literary and cultural scene. While unearthing its first attempts at self- definition, this dissertation first engages with the slave tradition in the particular context of Eighteenth century Enlightenment England, and explores how its emergence initiated the re-inscription of the black race within humankind after years of exclusion. By adopting a feminist and cultural perspective, this essay spotlights the female contribution, it equally examines the extent to which the double discrimination of race and gender further complicates the female identity formation project.  Significantly, Second Class Citizen, In The Ditch and Head Above Water stand as typical Afro-British texts that strongly resonate with earlier voices of the tradition, while promoting strategies of resistance and ultimately disturbing contructions of womanhood and female subjectivity. Through these narratives, Buchi Emecheta inscribes herself as a true heiress of an Afro-British female textuality inaugurated two centuries earlier by a pioneering figure as prestigious as Mary Prince. In its effort to uncover the identity politics informing this literary and discursive body, this study lays emphasis on the significance of generic choice to the Afro-British female self-telling via autobiography, while placing it within the much wider project of nation-telling.

This paper will focus on a passage from the novel The Lost Child (2015) written by the Kittitian-British novelist Caryl Phillips.
Since the most of Phillips’ works are related to the African Diasporas and the author himself is a British African-Caribbean, the study will initially refer to the Caribbean Diaspora and the concept of re-membering, with an overview on Postcolonial Literature as a genre. The sense of loss which derives from national and social unrooting will play a crucial role in The Lost Child, where it is mainly socially connotated. The novel will be considered under the perspective of its protagonists and especially Ben, who lost his brother and mother and lives without any reference point, compelled to find alone his place in the world, living a life in absentia. 
The translated passage, which concerns in fact the interior conflicts of Ben, will be compared to the original text and commented with special emphasis on translating issues.

To be given at: History, Postcolonialism and Tradition, The Postcolonial Studies Association Conference, 12 - 13 September 2013


South African audiences are not strangers to Ancient Greek drama. This paper asks whether, in the same sense as Gilroy's ever-pertinent 'Black Atlantic', there exists a 'Wine Dark Atlantic' which links South African culture back to Ancient Greek theatre and culture. The latter's promotion through the apartheid era, and its use by dissident groups points to the manner in which history is an engagement fundamentally in the present. Considered permissible under the apartheid government's cultural policy, imported theatre from Europe from Shakespeare (although Othello was first performed with a black lead, John Kani, in 1987 at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg) to Sophocles avoided ideological challenges to South African society. Radicalised performances of Antigone by the Serpent Players foregrounded Fugard, Kani and Ntshona's classic dissident play The Island, not only enacting the original's power reversal, but also showing the (arguably) futile nature of such protest. Nevertheless, when looking at anti-apartheid cultural struggle, the agency we attach to such theatre is politically important from a Cultural Materialist perspective, as it challenged official cultural policy and censorship. There is here the implicit relationship between politics and aesthetics.
More recently the work of Yael Farber has contested with the theatrical canon, taking care to relocate these plots to the South African context. Molora (2008), based off Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy, and the recent and internationally and locally acclaimed Mies Julie (2012), the appropriation of Strindberg's play, display definite engagement with theatrical traditions. In their performances there is an aesthetic engagement with local and Classical oral traditions. The relationship between text and performance here as a contestation and manifestation of tradition is important here, but also anxieties of the survival and re-performance of canonical, sometimes ancient, texts over South African ones. Molora, in engaging with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's testimonies, deals with the gendered issues and cast of the original, and the crimes against women during apartheid, produced through its cast and writer.  Farber's Theatre as Witness project is manifested here in an engagement with Classical theatre, a fertile ground with a long tradition in itself (Fugard's The Island, and Orestes for example). This shows the complex, contingent, material factors shaping Farber's oeuvre. With Farber's contemporary Reza De Wet also exploring her relationship to Chekhov, making sense of dramatic tradition is clearly paramount in challenging the ideological structures and assumptions of South African society and history in the post-apartheid, post-TRC period.