In the 1925 poem “Heritage,” African American writer Countee Cullen famously articulated his quest for cultural roots in the form of a deceptively simple question: “What is Africa to me?” At the time of its enunciation, this query was above all meant to resonate with members of the ‘old’ diaspora—that is, the descendants of people who were displaced as a consequence of the transatlantic slave trade. However, over the decades, the poet’s interrogation gradually became a pressing issue for the ‘new’ diaspora as well—which comprises those who were born (or whose parents were born) on the continent in the contemporary period but left it either as children or as adults. At the same time, the responses to Cullen’s original interrogation have been subject to transformation and renewal even within the ‘old’ diaspora itself, as early romantic views have more recently been supplemented by outlooks variously marked by restraint, disillusionment, or alienation, all of which deserve in-depth examination too. Hence, it seems time to inquire: “What is Africa to me now?”

In this special issue of Research in African Literatures, this updated question was put to three creative writers with diverse backgrounds. In the opening essay, Caribbean-British Caryl Phillips reflects on what Africa has meant to him over the years, and how a trip to Poland in the 1980s unexpectedly influenced his relationship with the continent. In another non-fictional piece, Guyanese-Nigerian Karen King-Aribisala recounts how her successive moves to Nigeria—first as a child, then as an adult—have challenged her views on a series of cultural practices ranging from clothing to greetings. Nigerian-Belgian Chika Unigwe, in an interview with Elisabeth Bekers, considers how living in Belgium, a country where belonging is still often synonymous with whiteness, has impacted her literary imagination.

These personal testimonies demonstrate how the singular stories brought to us by creative writers can help to defy the “single story” of Africa that was denounced by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her celebrated TED talk. Literary criticism too can participate in exploring the diversity of the contemporary literatures of the African diaspora. Therefore, this journal issue features six academic essays that engage with a variety of genres and geographies. Following Alison Donnell’s historical analysis of the different representations of the continent in the works of Caribbean writers and critics, the essay by Serena Guarracino examines how affect theory can help us apprehend the imagined Africa that haunts the opera and musical theatre of Toni Morrison. This ghostly Africa, in the novel Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) by Caribbean-Canadian Nalo Hopkinson, gives way to actual zombies that, in Rebecca Romdhani’s article, are revealed to symbolize the emotional legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and its impact on African-Caribbean people. Yet other facets of Africa are explored by Pilar Cuder-Domínguez in her essay on Canadian author Lawrence Hill, in which she shows how tam-tam drumming, trickster figures, and elephant-adorned maps all feature in Hill’s initially naïve, but later more subtle and sensitive, portrayal of Africa from his contemporary North American vantage point.

Turning to the ‘new’ diaspora and the United States, Bénédicte Ledent interprets the first novel by American-Ethiopian Dinaw Mengestu, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007), as an attempt to depict the African diaspora as a crossroads of different converging and diverging experiences. In the process, Ledent reappraises the diasporic paradigm and concludes to its continuing relevance, provided that it is used in a manner flexible enough to accommodate the multifarious identitarian configurations of the twenty-first century. The re-examination of analytical paradigms also takes center stage in Dave Gunning’s essay, which investigates how “Western” trauma theory and psychiatry often identify fragmented mental states as cases of dissociative identity disorder, while African cultures might diagnose similar conditions as being states of spirit possession. Based on this observation, the article examines how three African-British novels (by Aminatta Forna, Helen Oyeyemi, and Brian Chikwava) negotiate—or, indeed, literally enact—this epistemological gap. Finally, the essay by Joshua Yu Burnett delves into the future by exploring two textual representatives of the increasingly prominent genre of Afrofuturism. In his analysis of Nnedi Okorafor’s The Shadow Speaker (2007) and Who Fears Death (2010), Burnett argues that speculative fiction need not be burdened by its history as a white and colonially inclined genre but that it is, rather, uniquely equipped to explore the idea of a truly—and not just nominally—postcolonial Africa.

The different thematic, geographical, and methodological angles adopted by the authors in this volume can be considered “singular stories” in themselves, each of which offers a glimpse into the variegated experiences that characterize the African diaspora. In interrogating the contemporary moment, these pieces also scan the horizon for future possibilities—for, to echo an observation made by Burnett in his piece, to ask “What is Africa to me now?” is also, ultimately, to wonder, “What can Africa be to me?”

Table of contents

INTRODUCTION

Daria Tunca and Bénédicte Ledent
The Power of a Singular Story: Narrating Africa and Its Diasporas

Caryl Phillips
What Is Africa to Me Now?

Karen King-Aribisala
What Is Africa to Me Now? The Sweet, the Bitter . . .

INTERVIEW

Elisabeth Bekers
Writing Africa in Belgium, Europe: A Conversation with Chika Unigwe

ESSAYS

Alison Donnell
“The African Presence in Caribbean Literature” Revisited: Recovering the Politics of Imagined Co-Belonging 1930–2005

Serena Guarracino
Africa as Voices and Vibes: Musical Routes in Toni Morrison’s Margaret Garner and Desdemona

Rebecca Romdhani
Zombies Go to Toronto: Zombifying Shame in Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring

Pilar Cuder Domínguez
In Search of a “Grammar for Black”: Africa and Africans in Lawrence Hill’s Works

Bénédicte Ledent
Reconfiguring the African Diaspora in Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

Dave Gunning
Dissociation, Spirit Possession, and the Languages of Trauma in Some Recent African-British Novels

Joshua Yu Burnett
The Great Change and the Great Book: Nnedi Okorafor’s Postcolonial, Post-Apocalyptic Africa and the Promise of Black Speculative Fiction