Description
- Abstract:
- In African American and black diasporic literary studies, prominent critical conversations hail love as the foundation for racial cohesion. Without adequately attending to love as a historical and theoretical problem, critics deploy love as an affective tool of nationalist ideology. This dissertation contends, however, that the very use of love as a tool of resistance indexes the instability of communal bonds. This instability is particularly acute in the case of transnational movement and transcultural exchange, the very circumstances that theorists of diaspora like Paul Gilroy and Brent Edwards have proposed as the corrective to the “ethnocentrism” of black studies as a field. By analyzing the overlooked ambiguities of love, this project demonstrates how its unevenness epitomizes the paradox of being in diaspora. Instead of automatically claiming that love bolsters community, it suggests that black studies would be better served in probing the intellectual history of love within African American and black diasporic thought so as to account more fully for its persistence in the constitution of racial community. This dissertation argues that the literary writings of authors who are displaced from their natal origins, including Angela Y. Davis, Jamaica Kincaid, Caryl Phillips, and Hilton Als register transnational movement to present a distinctive account of the subject in relation to the community. Their works weigh the constraining and enticing prospects of communal belonging. By bringing together literary texts with historical and theoretical materials to examine the ambivalent representations of love, this project investigates the ways it has been central to Black Power discourses of the erotic, Caribbean nationalist representations of maternity, immigrant performances of assimilation, and black queer diasporic subjectivity. It finds that a historically informed account of love’s ideological results in the recognition of estranged subjects who are ambivalent about their alienation from community.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2016)
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Citation
Ford, Sachelle Marie,
"Intimate Crossings: Literature and the Politics of Black Diasporic Affection"
(2016).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z03J3BCQ
