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Re/cognizing the Time-Spaces of the Black Atlantic: A Response

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 December 2020

Winfried Siemerling Open the ORCID record for Winfried Siemerling [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

In this response to the incisive and stimulating discussions by Karina Vernon, Robert S. Levine, Barrington Walker, and Katja Sarkowsky of The Black Atlantic Reconsidered, I focus on the dynamic dimensions of Black Canadian and Black Atlantic time-spaces and temporalities, as well as issues of public, institutional, and pedagogical inclusion, incorporation, recognition, and transformation. In addition, questions of history and its uses, social aesthetics, and contrapuntal national/transnational frameworks are brought to the fore, often with reference to specific texts, to reflect on Black Canadian cultural achievement and its transnational and diasporic contexts both past and present.

Keywords

Black AtlanticdiasporaBlack Canadian writinginclusionrecognitionpedagogyhistorysocial aestheticstransformation
Type
Book Forum: Winfried Siemerling’s The Black Atlantic Reconsidered
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , January 2021 , pp. 114 - 120
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 For a detailed table of contents of the volume and related sources see the companion site: www.blackatlantic.ca. A timeline with the most important texts and authors is provided in pages 362–96 of the print edition.

2 Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman, “At Mt. Rushmore and the White House, Trump Updates ‘American Carnage’ Message for 2020,” New York Times, July 4, 2020 (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/04/us/politics/trump-mt-rushmore.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage).

3 Steven Morris, “Bristol Mayor: Colston Statue Removal Was Act of ‘Historical Poetry,’” The Guardian, June 13, 2020 (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jun/13/bristol-mayor-colston-statue-removal-was-act-of-historical-poetry).

4 Oliver Moore, “Tory Open to Renaming Dundas Street over Concerns about Anti-Black Racism,” Globe and Mail, June 10, 2020 (https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/toronto/article-tory-open-to-renaming-dundas-street-over-concerns-about-anti-black/).

5 Dionne Brand, “On Narrative, Reckoning and the Calculus of Living and Dying,” Toronto Star, July 4, 2020 (https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/2020/07/04/dionne-brand-on-narrative-reckoning-and-the-calculus-of-living-and-dying.html).

6 Hill, Lawrence, “A Conversation with Lawrence Hill,” with Winfried Siemerling, Callaloo 36.1 (2013): 5–26 Google Scholar, esp. 21.

7 See Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees’s comments on symbolic action (https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-statues-and-symbols-are-just-the-start-of-bristols-struggle-with/).

8 Gates, Henry Louis Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), xxiii Google Scholar, 21.

9 Stepto, Robert, “Teaching Afro-American Literature: Survey or Tradition,” in Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction, eds. Fisher, Dexter and Stepto, Robert B. (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1979), 8–24 Google Scholar, esp. 15.

10 Iton, Richard, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 9 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quoted by Walker.

11 Stepto, Robert B., From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (Urbana: University of Illinois Press), 1979), 198 Google Scholar; Diawara, Manthia, Black American Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 211 Google Scholar; see also bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” in Diawara, Black American Cinema, 295.

12 Clarke, George Elliott, “Harris, Philip, Brand: Three Authors in Search of Literate Criticism,” Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 253–74, esp. 254.

13 Wayde Compton, Esi Edugyan, and Karina Vernon, “Black Writers in Search of a Place: A Three Way Conversation about History, Role Models, and Inventing ‘The Black Atlantic,” The Tyee, 2005 (http://www.thetyee.ca/Life/2005/02/28/BlackWriters).

14 See also Levander, Caroline F. and Levine, Robert S., eds., Hemispheric American Studies (New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; and Siemerling, Winfried and Casteel, Sarah Phillips, eds., Canada and Its Americas: Transnational Navigations (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Siemerling, Winfried, The New North American Studies: Culture, Writing, and the Politics of Re/Cognition (New York: Routledge, 2005), 140 Google Scholar. The shorthand double sign of “re/cognition” thus signals the unsublatable differential between difference and assimilation, between the dialogic emergence of the new and the dialectic incorporation into the old.

16 Siemerling, The New North American Studies, 145; I use the phrase in a discussion of double consciousness in Du Bois’s first chapter of The Souls of Black Folk.

17 Hortense Spillers, The Black Atlantic Reconsidered companion website (http://blackatlantic.ca/about-2/).