Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-13T15:41:29.275Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The National, the Transnational, and the Diasporic: Black Canadian Writing and the Logic of Literary History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 December 2020

Katja Sarkowsky
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This response takes as its starting point the twofold agenda Winfried Siemerling pursues in The Black Atlantic Reconsidered: his systematic outline of a history of Black writing in Canada from the eighteenth century to the present and his goal to fill a geographical gap in Paul Gilroy’s influential concept of the Black Atlantic, thereby also offering a reconsideration of this concept. I suggest that, although Siemerling is clearly successful with regard to the first aspect, he is only partially so with regard to the second, with the logic of a nation-based literary history to some extent countering the agenda of the constitutive transnationality of the Black Atlantic. This tension between the two agendas, I suggest, results in crucial questions concerning the complex relationship among the national, the transnational, and the diasporic in the specific logic of literary histories.

Keywords

literary historytransnationalitydiasporic writingrecognition
Type
Book Forum: Winfried Siemerling’s The Black Atlantic Reconsidered
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , January 2021 , pp. 109 - 113
Check for updates
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 4.Google Scholar

2 Siemerling, Winfried, The Black Atlantic Reconsidered: Black Canadian Writing, Cultural History, and the Presence of the Past (Montreal: McGill/Queen’s University Press, 2015), 98.Google Scholar

3 Clarke, George Elliott, “The Black Atlantic Reconsidered: Black Canadian Literature, Cultural History, and the Presence of the Past by Winfried Siemerling (review),” University of Toronto Quarterly 86.3 (2017): 184–85, esp. 185.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Siemerling, The Black Atlantic Reconsidered, 30.

5 Blodgett, E. D., Five-Part Invention. A History of Literary History in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 210.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Clarke, “The Black Atlantic Reconsidered,” 185.

7 Clarke, George Elliott, “Must All Blackness Be American? Locating Canada in Borden’s ‘Tightrope Time,’ or Nationalizing Gilroy’s Black Atlantic,” Odysseys Home. Mapping African-Canadian Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 71–85, esp. 71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Siemerling, Winfried, The New North American Studies: Culture, Writing, and the Politics of Re/Cognition (New York: Routledge, 2005), 133; emphasis mine.Google Scholar

9 Siemerling, The New North American Studies, 136.

10 Siemerling, The New North American Studies, 140.

11 Siemerling, The New North American Studies, 2.

12 Walcott, Rinaldo, Black Like Who? Writing Black Canada (Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2003). Kindle. Loc. 465.Google Scholar

13 Siemerling, The Black Atlantic Reconsidered, 30.

14 Siemerling, The Black Atlantic Reconsidered, 360–61.