Passages to (Be) Longing: Contemporary Black Novels of Diaspora and Dislocation

"Passages to (Be)Longing" looks at contemporary novels of the anglophone African diaspora through the lens of movement, migration, and dislocation, with particular attention to how the selected authors depict black diasporic identity formation, and how they contribute to it through their writings. Thematically, this dissertation examines literary representations of the social, cultural, and psychological consequences that involuntary and voluntary migrations have had for black communities and individuals in North America, the Caribbean, and Britain. Methodologically, it operates at the interface of literary studies, black/Africana studies, diaspora studies, and Atlantic studies. It explores the juncture of history, memory, geography, and diasporic identity, as represented by eight contemporary novelists of African and African-Caribbean descent: Charles Johnson (Middle Passage), Lawrence Hill ( The Book of Negroes), Toni Morrison (Sula and Tar Baby), George Lamming (The Emigrants), Caryl Phillips (The Final Passage, A State of Independence, and Crossing the River), Andrea Levy (Small Island), Cecil Foster (Sleep on, Beloved), and Edwidge Danticat ( Breath, Eyes, Memory).;Three interrelated arguments inform this study. First, I posit that my selected novelists actively contribute to the ongoing transnational formation of black diasporic identities. Second, I propose that much can be gained by applying a dually focused thematic approach that both examines these novelists' representations of "diaspora" and explores their depictions of the more loosely and temporarily understood experience of "dislocation" because, in these authors' treatment, the diasporic longing to belong manifests itself in stories of various types of black displacement. Third, the novels analyzed here reflect what I term, referencing W.E.B. Du Bois's intellectual and terminological legacy (and Paul Gilroy's and Samir Dayal's dialogues with it) a "diasporic double consciousness." That is, my selected novelists on the one hand portray the possibility of belonging as if it were, in itself, a fiction for their protagonists. On the other hand, they depict their geographically re-routed characters' desire to have a framework of identification transcending temporary, fleeting social roles as a fundamental human need that cannot be suppressed without incurring psychological damage. Any shared dynamics characterizing the diverse body of contemporary black anglophone diasporic literature coalesce around this duality.;Chapter 1 discusses Johnson's fictional account of the Middle Passage, the foundational in-transit experience of black diasporic history; chapter 2, Hill's creation of a late-eighteenth-century diasporic individual who, during her long and adventurous life, inhabits various locations on the Atlantic rim; chapter 3, Morrison's and Phillips's linkages of war, citizenship, African American troops/veterans, and diaspora; chapter 4, Lamming's, Phillips's, and Levy's novels about black Caribbean immigrants' lives in Britain after World War II; and chapter 5, Phillips's, Foster's, and Danticat's depictions of contemporary black Caribbean encounters with the United States and Canada, with a particular emphasis on the complexities of "return." My discussion proceeds chronologically, in terms of the eras that the authors portray, and is also organized around national and continental categories relevant to Atlantic scholarship. At the same time, my study recognizes the limitations of such categories and points beyond them towards what Gilroy in Against Race terms "planetary humanism" a transnational approach that, within the Gilroyan paradigm, draws much of its interpretive potential from the concept of diaspora.