| Challenging the prevalent assumption that diaspora and nationalism represent mutually opposed cultural formations, my dissertation rethinks the relationship between race, nation, and diaspora. Through my analyses of literary representations of Africa---by both diasporic writers such as Pauline Hopkins, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, and Caryl Phillips, and "native" writers such as J. E. Casely Hayford, Attoh Ahuma, and Kwame Nkrumah---I argue that diaspora and nationalism are best read contrapuntally, as intertwined and overlapping discourses. While nationalist thought is usually linked with an essentialist racial ideology, diasporic thought is linked with the practice of hybridity. Drawing on the insights of diaspora theorists such as Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, James Clifford, and Edouard Glissant, I unsettle the restrictive binary of essentialism and hybridity by reading nationalist and diasporic formulations as mutually constitutive. Developing this argument in terms of genre, I proceed from Benedict Anderson's suggestion of an inextricable relation between the nation and the realist novel. According to Anderson, the realist novel institutes a developmental theory of history, and a notion of "homogenous empty time," thus becoming the ideal symbol for the modern nation. On the other hand, diaspora is commonly linked to the genre of the imperial romance, implying a non-linear, messianic temporality. In this dissertation, I suggest that realism and romance work together to construct such black Atlantic texts as Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood (1902), W. E. B. Du Bois's Dark Princess (1928), J. E. Casely Hayford's Ethiopia Unbound (1911), Richard Wright's Black Power (1954), and Caryl Phillips's Cambridge (1991) and Crossing the River (1993). The literature I analyze contains both the teleological, modernizing impulse of nationalist realism and the recursive logic of diasporic romance. To imagine a community that is characterized by both national and transnational concerns, such black millennial texts constitute an eclectic genre, where the realist narrative of the nation is interrupted by the romance of the diaspora. I suggest that the peculiar nature of black nationalism---its necessary constitution in diaspora---entails such complexity of form. |
