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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
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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
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

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

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