AFRICA AND TRANS-ATLANTIC MEMORIES: Literary and Aesthetic Manifestations of Diaspora and History
The trans-Atlantic slave trade and the concomitant enslavement of Africans created an enduring connection between Africa and the scattered communities of peoples of African origins in the Americas and elsewhere. These tragic events of slavery have profoundly influenced the literary imagination, whether in Africa, Europe or the Americas. The authors in this collection explore the ways in which trans-Atlantic constructions of this historical experience find expression in the literary mode. The essays examine the ways that writers and performers have used a variety of literary traditions, including narrative, poetry, myth, legend, autobiography, and drama, as well as song and the cinema, to engage in the construction of imagined yet realistic perceptions of Africa through literary representation.
David V. Trotman is a Professor in the Department of History at York University and a research associate of the Harriet Tubman Institute and the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean.
Other publications from this author include:
- Letters from the Voyages of the Slave Ship Pearl (2018)
- Atlantic Childhoods in Global Contexts (2016)
- Remembering Africa & Its Diasporas: Memory, Public History & Representations of the Past (2012)
- Beyond Fragmentation: Perspectives on Caribbean History (2006)
- Contesting freedom : control and resistance in the post-emancipation Caribbean (2005)
- Trans-Atlantic Dimensions of Ethnicity in the African Diaspora (2003)
- Crime in Trinidad : conflict and control in a plantation society, 1838-1900 (1987)