Review
“There is much to admire in Literature and Culture in the Black Atlantic: its erudition, its originality, its verve. What sets Campbell’s book apart is its sophisticated deployment of Caribbean-derived models of hybridity and time, and its twinned emphasis on Africa in the medieval imagination and the contemporary Black Atlantic. Campbell’s scholarship is an important and ambitious contribution; absolutely essential reading for medievalists and postcolonial theorists alike.”–Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Professor of English, George Washington University, author of The Postcolonial Middle Ages and Hybridity, Identity and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain
“In Kofi Campbell’s Literature and Culture in the Black Atlantic we have a new medievalism at work in the most intelligent and original version. Here, the cultural discourse of the Middle Ages, with all its claims and anxieties, is finally confronted with the project of the Black Atlantic. This book shows how a new kind of comparative literary studies, one cutting across geographies, periods, and disciplines, can enrich scholarship. The range of writers covered here is impressive and the discussion of cross cultural encounters and the texts that enable them is rich.”—Simon Gikandi, Professor of English, Princeton University, author of Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature and Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism
“This is a fascinating and ambitious study, which seeks to provide a cultural genealogy for Paul Gilroy’s conception of the Black Atlantic. By reading modern Caribbean literature in the context of pre-modern constructions of African identity, Campbell offers a daring new perspective on modern constructions of nation, ethnicity, and race.”–Suzanne Akbari, Associate Professor of English, Medieval Studies, and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto, author of Seeing Through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory
“Kofi Campbell gives compelling reasons why a critical re-reading of Gilroy’s take on the Black Atlantic is both timely and necessary. His superb historical imagination enables him to see the Black Atlantic independently of, and prior to, the white gaze, while his sociological insights lead to a nuanced view of both history and culture as hybridized.”– Anton Allahar, Professor of Sociology, University of Western Ontario, author of Sociology and the Periphery: Theories and Issues
“Kofi Campbell’s scholarly and rigorous study argues very convincingly about the need to move beyond the Middle Passage in order to locate and historicize the complexity of the black diaspora. An impressive and timely work that brings together a broad range of material to shed new light on the pre-colonial past and the postcolonial present. A very significant and original contribution to both African and postcolonial studies.”–Chelva Kanaganayakam, Professor of English and Postcolonial Studies, and Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Toronto, author of Counterrealism and Indo-Anglian Fiction and Configurations of Exile: South Asian Writers and Their World
Book Description
This book extends our understanding of the Black Atlantic, a term coined by Paul Gilroy to describe the political, cultural and creative interrelations among blacks living in Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Gilroy famously locates the beginning of Black Atlantic history in the Middle Passage, the mass transportation of slaves from Africa to the Caribbean. Campbell argues that that history in fact predates the Middle Passage and focuses on pre-colonial (i.e. Medieval and early Renaissance) English literary constructions of blacks, Africa and the Caribbean, and the effects of those constructions on post-Independence Caribbean literature. In this way, the book situates the Middle Passage within larger historical and cultural processes, rather than as the centre and origin of Black Atlantic history.
