{"id":1076,"date":"2020-08-24T08:54:05","date_gmt":"2020-08-24T13:54:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/blog\/?p=1076"},"modified":"2020-08-24T08:54:05","modified_gmt":"2020-08-24T13:54:05","slug":"afrofuturism-the-diaspora-strikes-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/blog\/afrofuturism-the-diaspora-strikes-back\/","title":{"rendered":"Afrofuturism: The Diaspora Strikes Back"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Black writers throughout the world grapple with the same question\nas Black American writers: How do we make money in a world which had once used\nour bodies as money? How do we thrive in a place \u2013 whether it be Guadeloupe,\nCanada, or Cuba \u2013 that had been our ancestors\u2019 hell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The global movement for racial justice intertwines with Loganberry\nBooks\u2019 celebration of Black Future Month. Afrofuturism, a multi-national movement,\nimagines a world in which the people of the African diaspora, a global\nunderclass, continue to live and thrive. This\nAmerican Life<\/a> describes Afrofuturism as a way of looking at Black culture\nthat\u2019s fantastic, creative, and oddly hopeful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Director of the Stanford Center for Racial Justice<\/a> and University School alumni, Professor Richard Ralph Banks gave a lecture to his alma mater in July. Posed with the question whether U.S. citizens can look to another country as an exemplar of racial justice, he answered, \u201cNot really. The United States is attempting something that has never been done.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If racial equality ever exists, it will exist in the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We know the history of the 17th<\/sup> Atlantic slave triangle:\nland, labor, capital. Capital and finished goods flowed from Europe to west\nAfrica where African people where captured as payment and investment. Enslaved\nAfricans were shipped to American lands as conscripted labor to farm raw\nmaterials, such as sugar, cotton, and tobacco. Raw materials were transported\nto Europe for production and capital investment payments. The official end was\n1853.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Modern novelists from the African diaspora query how today\u2019s obstructions to the triangle \u2013 walls, detention centers, and anti-blackness \u2013 stint the flow of labor and capital.\u00a0 In an irony, new walls against immigration imperil the people who were the slave triangle\u2019s abductees and source of capital. Black people are confined in places capital abandoned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here are three novels which explore Afrofuturism from a global\nvantage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana<\/a><\/strong>, Maryse Conde (2020, translated from the French by Richard Philcox) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Fraternal twins Ivan and Ivana migrate from the French\ndepartment Guadeloupe to Mali and finally to France, tracing backwards the\nslave trade. Ivana embraces French culture which Conde calls the \u201cthe effluvium\nof civilization\u201d as she prospers in changing environments. Ivan, a strapping\nblack youth, falls victim to French culture and becomes an increasingly violent\nadherent to radical Islamic terrorism. Think of the Paris bombings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The novel is both an intellectual exercise and a page-turning\nthriller. Like most celebrated French authors, Conde is a literary snob. She\nreferences Victor Hugo, Flaubert, and Aime Cesaire and expects the reader to\nkeep pace. The novel will appeal to people who enjoyed the Senegalese movie\n\u201cAtlantics\u201d (2019) which contemplates the fate of African men who migrate to\nEurope for work and the women left behind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Black Cathedral<\/a><\/strong>, Marcial Gaia (2020, translated from Spanish by Anna Kushner)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Black Cathedral is interesting. The setting is mostly the\nCuban town of Cienfuegos which has its fractured divisions of middle class and\npoor, black, white and mulatto, the good side of the tracks and the bad, the\ncreative class and the workers, foreign and native born. The characters are\nstatic; the book seems to be about what happens to those who stay in\nCienfuegos, those who immigrate to other countries but carry their hectic homes\nin their hearts, and those who immigrate to forget the place. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two things make Black Cathedral highly readable and\nsuspenseful. First, the book is refreshing in its taut sense of real violence,\nnot staged violence because the blood is real; every character is in imminent\ndanger of physical harm. You turn the pages because you fear for them.\nSecondly, it overturns the idealized notion of Cuba as egalitarian society.\nRacial, gender, and class conflicts are complex and shifting, disappearing for\na moment only to emerge relevant again. As a bookseller, I would recommend it\nto a reader drawn to the masculine perspective of Gabriel Garcia Marques, the\nreligious iconoclasm of Salman Rushdie, and the national myth-busting of Naguib\nMahfouz.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brown Girl in a Ring<\/a><\/strong>, Nalo Hopkinson (1998, published originally in Canada)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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People debate whether \u201cBrown Girl in a Ring\u201d is magical\nrealism or fantasy. Let me say this: If you are a fan of the fantasy genre and\na lover of the classic quest story, \u201cBrown Girl in a Ring\u201d is everything. This\nnovel is for fans of Margaret Atwood\u2019s \u201cOryx and Crake\u201d and Olivia Butler\u2019s \u201cParable\nof the Sower.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The wealthy abandon Toronto, taking with them all investment\nin electricity, water, and roads and moving to the suburbs where they dwell behind\narmed barricades. A bad man, named Rudy, lords over post-riot Toronto from the\nCN Tower, enriching himself off its people\u2019s desperation and harvesting organs.\nThe hero, Ti-Jeanne, a young Jamaican immigrant mother, must harness the power\nof Papa Legba, the god of the crossroads, to take Rudy down. She has three days\nto break his calabash pot which is the voodoo equivalent of the Ring of Power.  Go, girl.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In an irony, new walls against immigration imperil the people who were the slave triangle\u2019s abductees and source of capital. Black people are confined in places capital abandoned. Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2406,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,13,15],"tags":[104,106,105],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1076"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2406"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1076"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1076\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1078,"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1076\/revisions\/1078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}