| My dissertation examines the concept of "diaspora" in African-American literature and contemporary criticism. Analyzing diasporic subjectivities, locations, and perspectives in the novels by Martin Delany, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, Charles Johnson, and Gloria Naylor, I argue that the African diaspora can be productively re-imagined against the background of post-Civil Rights America. My readings of the fiction place traditional African-American literary criticism in communication with postcolonial theory, cultural studies, multiculturalism, transnationalism, and other minority discourses.; The concept of diaspora is nothing new in African-American literary and political discourses. From the late antebellum period to the Harlem Renaissance, such influential figures as Martin Delany, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay, and Langston Hughes had committed themselves to the issues of home and diaspora in their relation to the Pan-African politics of identity. During the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, when the term "African diaspora" began to be used by scholars and writers concerned with the status and prospects of peoples of African descent in the New World, it served the purpose of cultural nationalism. In this dissertation, my approach is aligned with more recent critical positions---e.g. Paul Gilroy's black Atlanticism---that revise those traditional Afrocentric and essentialist attitudes toward a shared cultural heritage.; The first chapter tracks usage of the term "diaspora" within and outside African-American literary discourses. In the second chapter, I analyze two different representations of diasporic experiences such as the Middle Passage and the physical visit to Africa in Delany's antebellum text and Johnson's post-Black Nationalist text. Chapter three reveals the way in which Marshall negotiates the dynamics of identity and location in her diasporic imagination. In chapter four, I illuminate how Morrison's and Naylor's novels deal with the relationship between a community formation outside U.S. national boundaries and a diasporic historicity in the Americas. Finally, in the fifth chapter, I argue that Reed dramatizes the interplay between Neo-Hoodoo authenticity and multicultural performativity in his ambivalent rendering of African diasporic cultures. |
