Adair explores kinship in contemporary fiction from around the black Atlantic, and the means these literary texts find to write diasporic kinship. The six novels she considers explicitly engage with the meanings, experiences, and practices of kinship in the context of multiple black Atlantic diasporas and in the wake of slavery and colonialism. She covers rewriting anthropology: Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother and Pauline Melville's The Ventriloquist's Tale, historiography and the afterlife of slavery: Andrea Levy's The Long Song and Dionne Brand's At the full and Change of the Moon, and queer diasporic relationality: Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco and Jackie Kay's Trumpet. Annotation ©2020 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched.
This book considers the meaning of kinship across black Atlantic diasporas in the Caribbean, Western Europe and North America via readings of six contemporary novels. It draws upon and combines insights from postcolonial studies, queer theory and black Atlantic diaspora studies in novel ways to examine the ways in which contemporary writers engage with the legacy of anthropological discourses of kinship, interrogate the connections between kinship and historiography, and imagine new forms of diasporic relationality and subjectivity. The novels considered here offer sustained meditations on the meaning of kinship and its role in diasporic cultures and communities; they represent diasporic kinship in the context and crosscurrents of both historical and contemporary forces, such as slavery, colonialism, migration, political struggles and artistic creation. They show how displacement and migration require and generate new forms and understandings of kinship, and how kinship may be used as
an instrument of both political oppression and resistance. Finally, they demonstrate the importance of literature in imagining possibilities for alternative forms of relationality and in finding a language to express the meaning of those relations. This book thus suggests that an analysis of discourses and practices of kinship is essential to understanding diasporic modernity at the turn of the twenty-first century.
