Book contents
- Diaspora and Literary Studies
- Cambridge Critical Concepts
- Diaspora and Literary Studies
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Origins Revisited
- Part II Major Concepts
- Chapter 7 The Shock of Relation
- Chapter 8 Strangers and Brothers
- Chapter 9 Incommensurability, Inextricability, Entanglement
- Chapter 10 Radical Black Poetics and South–South Movement
- Chapter 11 Remembering the Uses of Diaspora, or Palestine Is Still the Issue
- Chapter 12 Refugee Ecologies
- Chapter 13 Diaspora and Detention
- Part III Readings in Genre, Gender, and Genealogies
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 8 - Strangers and Brothers
James Baldwin’s Encounters with Africa
from Part II - Major Concepts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 July 2023
- Diaspora and Literary Studies
- Cambridge Critical Concepts
- Diaspora and Literary Studies
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Origins Revisited
- Part II Major Concepts
- Chapter 7 The Shock of Relation
- Chapter 8 Strangers and Brothers
- Chapter 9 Incommensurability, Inextricability, Entanglement
- Chapter 10 Radical Black Poetics and South–South Movement
- Chapter 11 Remembering the Uses of Diaspora, or Palestine Is Still the Issue
- Chapter 12 Refugee Ecologies
- Chapter 13 Diaspora and Detention
- Part III Readings in Genre, Gender, and Genealogies
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
For many scholars of the African diaspora, the genre of travel writing represents a worldview largely informed by Western conquest and colonization. American writer James Baldwin’s encounters with West Africans and North Africans – described in essays he wrote between 1950 and 1972 – questions a longstanding presumption: that African American expatriate writers transcended the limits of travel-writing in order to stand in opposition to colonialist concepts of modernity. This chapter argues that Baldwin’s travel essays implicate dislocated subjects in complex networks of power, at times reasserting Europe’s colonial and racial logics and at times challenging them.
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- Information
- Diaspora and Literary Studies , pp. 154 - 168Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023