Part of review forum on “The Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature” by Sarah Quesada
I’m extremely grateful to African Studies Review for soliciting this generative discussion of my book and to all the thoughtful and generous readings of my interlocutors. It is hard to respond to their insightful commentary in brief form, so my remarks will address two main themes that I think are threaded throughout this dedicated reading: 1) the notion of the book’s reach expanding what we understand as an “archive” in literary and cultural studies; and 2) the comparative reach of a “Latin-African” approach.
When attempting to bridge Latinx-American with African studies, as is the case of this book, the notion of expanding the archive, to use Santiago Acosta’s excellent phrase in this forum, can be equivocal. This is because what defines that “archive” is no simple matter: the records are not in a readily identified place and are scattered across the globe and across understandings of the historical. In this regard, I wonder whether the ‘archive’ is the right term for this project because there is a reason Ariella Azoulay terms the archive a “regime”: “the materialization of violence bodies, objects, and environments” (Azoulay Reference Azoulay2019, 164, 172). For indeed, the archive exists as a semantics and categorization from the putative West on others living outside of this semantic. Incredibly, the archive is not in the business of remembering, but rather of forgetting the deprivation of others. One of the most haunting parts of Azoulay’s Potential History is when she asks us why we “continue to ask the archive for documents about those who are deprived of this right, as though the archive, being one of the major players invested in the naturalization of imperial categories can produce anything other than propaganda files” (165).
I did not want to trace a Latin-African history of propaganda files. Instead, I wanted to look at a living archive. I sought this by interviewing locals at African UNESCO Slave Route sites and interpreting their own connection with the Americas at sites where transatlanticism would arguably be evoked all the time. In this way, I was perhaps less interested in the archive of the dead, as Saidiya Hartman categorizes these traces in “Venus in Two Acts” (2008) and turned instead to the archive of the living: a continuous present of oral tradition. We know of the many written traditions from regions in Ethiopia or Egypt to the Tuareg Berbers in Algeria, Burkina Faso, and Mali. But many Africanists will also point out the richness of oral tradition that is nevertheless questioned as a “history.” As Valentin Y. Mudimbe reminds us, oral philosophy “still implies both the traditional notions of historical backwardness and its potentiality for evolution” (Mudimbe Reference Mudimbe1988, 75). These ever-evolving oral traditions would be dismissed if they had not been written down. And as my late mentor Paulin Hountondji stated, transcribing the oral offers narratives permanence and is a “precautionary measure for anyone who values them sufficiently to want to see them survive” (Hountondji Reference Hountondji2002, 220–21). Revealing African proverbs that are reflected in the American stories I selected have less to do with an act of preservation or archivizing— a “poststructural” attempt to categorize textuality and language. Instead, I wanted to expand the story of this meaningful engagement of American narrative with African intellectual history. This does not mean I did not engage with the archive of the dead, but I also attempted to lend space to narratives of the living, from guides at the Slave Route and others surrounding them; narratives that relate or compare to stories in the Americas that we would have never claimed as African.
This point also connects to Lanie Millar’s astute comment that the book “responds to the larger question of the location of the literary.” I am reminded of Joseph Slaughter’s presidential address to the American Comparative Literature Association. In “Locations of Comparison” he laments that when African intellectuals discussed the place of African literature among themselves within the continent, they felt the need to “turn African literature into something suitable for comparison” to justify its existence (Slaughter Reference Slaughter2018, 222–23). And when this comparative literature reached the American shores, Slaughter bemoans that the African Studies Association attempted to “legitimize” African literature in the mid-1960s by way of drawing analogies to US American culture, ironically overlooking the Third World framework unfolding in real time across the Global South. My book does not just tell the story of the Cold War era as this period relates to African and Latin American literary encounters; it expands it into the colonial, imperial, and neoliberal eras in Africa to consider the location for comparison as Latin-African. This is not to suggest that African literature needs only to continue its comparative characterization, but that when it is doing the comparing, that it can be wrested from its hegemonic leanings.
In this vein, and as Gilbert Ndi Shang noted, I wanted to think of “Africa as a relational space.” This means that the location of comparison can remain on the African continent, where Latinx and Latin American texts can come to approach it on Africa’s own terms. To do so, I thought it necessary to break free from the traditional spatiotemporality that, in American or Caribbean studies, usually evokes a transatlantic connection: the slave trade. As Shang put it so cleverly, although the Slave Trade tends to be the temporality to theorize blackness in the Americas, this tendency “should not be to the detriment of a deeper engagement with Africa.” This answers Estefanía Bournot’s intriguing question, in that this book did seek to break away from what we consider to be “African heritage” in the Americas precisely because this book was less interested with “African retentions” inherited from slavery or traditions of négritude that followed. Instead, it engages American authors’ characterization of what is lost when Africa is not addressed in its particularity; itself, its own debate. By particularity, this book did not engage in the dichotomies presented in the 1970s in works like Fabien Eboussi Boulaga (where Africanity is placed in a dichotomy between primitivism and Westernization, Eboussi Boulaga, Reference Eboussi Boulaga1977). Instead, the book indexes instances of African history or politics with the world over time in the vein of Frantz Fanon’s definition of Third Worldism (1961). While the American literary authors I cite might still be beholden to outdated notions of what African regions are in their particularity, I see these attitudes less as a performance—in the ways Stuart Hall describes identity performance. Rather, I see them more as critiquing their own lack of African referents beyond the slave trade memory, as Achy Obejas’s novel Ruins does with the referents of slave sites like Badagry or Gorée (Obejas Reference Obejas2009). And that too, is a reckoning with an all but realizable Latin-African heritage.
