Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture Series

Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature offers a rich, interdisciplinary treatment of modern black literature and cultural history, showing how debates over Africa in the works of major black writers generated productive models for imagining political agency. Yogita Goyal analyzes the tensions between romance and realism in the literature of the African diaspora, examining a remarkably diverse group of twentieth-century authors, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Chinua Achebe, Richard Wright, Ama Ata Aidoo and Caryl Phillips. Shifting the center of black diaspora studies by considering Africa as constitutive of black modernity rather than its forgotten past, Goyal argues that it is through the figure of romance that the possibility of diaspora is imagined across time and space. Drawing on literature, political history and postcolonial theory, this significant addition to the cross-cultural study of literatures will be of interest to scholars of African American studies, African studies and American literary studies.

Acknowledgements; Introduction: the romance of diaspora; 1. From domestic allegory to imperial romance: Pauline Hopkins and racial mixture; 2. From double consciousness to diaspora: W. E. B. Du Bois and black internationalism; 3. From nativism to nationalism: Joseph Casely Hayford, Chinua Achebe and colonial modernity; 4. From romance to realism: Richard Wright and nation time; 5. From revolution to arrested decolonization: Ama Ata Aidoo and the long view of history; 6. From return to redemption: Caryl Phillips and postcolonial hybridity; Notes.

Yogita Goyal is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.