The Black Diasporic discourse Term Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

The Black Diasporic discourse - Term Paper Example Every period in the history of African American literature portrays its unique theme. Yet, in every period, almost all African American writers have tried to present event a quick look into the diverse and rich histories of African Americans. The transatlantic slave trade transported millions of Africans to the Americas, Caribbean, India, Europe, North Africa, and the Arab world. Numerous African American literary texts describe this great movement in detail. Michael Gomez provides a factual description of the African Diaspora in his book Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora, while Charles Henry Rowell presents a collection of African American fiction and poetry in his book Making Callaloo: 25 Years of Black Literature. This paper analyzes how the African slave trade’s shaping of the African diaspora was described in these two important books. African Diaspora in Black Literature The massive forced transport of Africans does not match precisely the meaning of dias pora. African slaves do not belong to a single ethnic or religious group, but to different beliefs, cultures, and ethnicity. However, the concept of diaspora can be related to the African diaspora in its broadest meaning of diffusion and preserved cultural traditions. Millions of Africans who were scattered across the globe through the slave trade kept hold of their culture, and continuously practiced it through rituals, traditions, music, and religion. Over the recent decades, the black Atlantic discipline has placed emphasis on the shaping of racial groups across the globe, with a focus on the flow of material objects and ideas. And still Africa is strangely missing in these lively and flourishing discourses, as the Atlantic is still viewed as mainly talking about the flow of objects, peoples, and ideas between the Americas and Europe. Hence, African American literature emerges to describe how Africa is positioned in the discourses and writings of black diasporic authors. Taking i nto consideration literary portrayals of Africa by African, black British, and African-American authors, this paper argues that a charting of Africa in diasporic literature contributes much to the reconstruction of current perspectives of diaspora. In black diaspora literary texts, the symbol of Africa refers as strongly to aspirations of liberation and restoration of a lost homeland. Read as one, the literary creations of authors, such as Caryl Phillips, Percival Everett, and the other authors included in the book Making Callaloo, make up a black Atlantic collection. This collection comprises not just writings that emphasize transnational movement across different points of the Atlantic, but also texts that adopt the theoretical features of the concept of diaspora—the effort to unearth a valuable past, the significance of memory, and the loss of home. Moreover, a study of diaspora essentially requires a thought on the outcomes of slavery, as well as an analysis on the relati onship of Africans to the Western word and its intellectual forces, specifically those that have been identified with regard to Africans—reason and modernity. Two of the most remarkable contemporary writers of African diaspora are Michael Gomez and Charles Henry Rowell. In Reversing Sail, Michael Gomez explores the factual scattering and movement of Africans since ancient times. The struggles of Africans in Europe, the Arab world, and the Mediterranean are afterward marked by their migration into the Americas, where their predicaments in territories invaded by European colonizers are examined in relation to the African