“The range of scholarship that this volume represents is truly impressive at every stage, and the critical undertaking that it embodies serves as a useful and insightful summation of the field.”—Review of English Studies  
 
“A compelling and generative source for scholars and students of myriad fields.”—Studies in the Novel
 
“An insightful and illuminating read, with much to teach about the diasporic imagination in the aftermath of the Second World War.”—British Society for Literature and Science  
 
“A thoughtful, detailed reading of several contemporary Afro-diasporan Anglophone writers from Canada, England, the United States, and the Caribbean.”—New West Indian Guide

 
"Makes a compelling case for a rethinking of narrative moments including slavery, the Middle Passage, and colonization that have defined the fiction produced in a transatlantic geography. Provokes a reassessment of notions of Africa as an ur-home and figurations of nation-state. A must-read."--Maxine Lavon Montgomery, author of The Fiction of Gloria Naylor: Houses and Spaces of Resistance

"Shows how literary texts perform a cultural mediation of diasporic memory."--Wendy W. Walters, author of Archives of the Black Atlantic: Reading between Literature and History
 
"Moves productively between the civil-rights generation of African American novelists, to the cultural-nationalist generation of Caribbean writers from the decolonization era, to contemporary British, Canadian, and American writers."--Olakunle George, author of Relocating Agency: Modernity and African Letters
 
 
Precarious Passages unites literature written by members of the far-flung Black Anglophone diaspora. Rather than categorizing novels as simply "African American," "Black Canadian," "Black British," or "postcolonial African Caribbean," this book takes an integrative approach: it argues that fiction creates and sustains a sense of a wider African diasporic community in the Western world.  
 
Tuire Valkeakari analyzes the writing of Toni Morrison, Caryl Phillips, Lawrence Hill, and other contemporary novelists of African descent. She shows how their novels connect with each other and with defining moments in the transatlantic experience, most notably the Middle Passage and enslavement. The lives of their characters are marked by migration and displacement. Their protagonists yearn to experience fulfilling human connection in a place they can call home. Portraying strategies of survival, adaptation, and resistance across the limitless varieties of life experiences in the diaspora, these novelists continually reimagine what it means to share a Black diasporic identity.
 
 
Tuire Valkeakari is professor of English at Providence College and the author of Religious Idiom and the African American Novel, 1952-1998.
 
Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Sample Chapter(s):

Table of Contents

Excerpt

An insightful and illuminating read, with much to teach about the diasporic imagination in the aftermath of the Second World War.
--British Society for Literature and Science

A compelling and generative source for scholars and students of myriad fields.
--Studies in the Novel