Introduction : listening to the archives : Black lesbian literature and queer memory -- Desirous mistresses and unruly slaves : neo-slave narratives, property, power, and desire -- Small movements : ...queer blues epistemologies in Cherry Muhanji's Her -- "Mens womens some that is both some that is neither" : spiritual epistemology and queering the Black rural South in the work of Sharon Bridgforth -- "Make it up and trace it back" : remembering Black trans subjectivity in Jackie Kay's Trumpet -- What grace was : erotic epistemologies and diasporic belonging in Dionne Brand's In another place, not here -- Epilogue : grieving the queer : anti-Black violence and black collective memory
Two centuries after the first autobiography by an enslaved African was published in London, black British authors revisit the historical issue of slavery by imagining the life stories of (former) ...slaves. They develop the African American genre of the neo-slave narrative by focusing on Britain's involvement in slavery as well as on the importance of slave authorship to the historical emancipation process and the present-day 'rememory' of slavery. Framed by a synoptic review of the politics and aesthetics of the slave and neo-slave narrative and a preamble discussion of J.M. Coetzee's Foe, this article discusses the metafictional emphasis on slave authorship in Caryl Phillips's Cambridge, one of Britain's pioneering neo-slave narratives, and in two more recent examples produced in the context of the 2007 commemorations of the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade: Jackie Kay's poetical radio-play The Lamplighter and Andrea Levy's metafictional novel The Long Song. These three black British neo-slave narratives do not just grant (formerly) enslaved men and women the opportunity to narrate their own life stories but also take an increasingly overt interest in their narrators' autobiographical endeavours, and thus highlight the creative challenges that this genre of fictional life writing may present to literal and figurative modes of captivity.
This essay compares two works of nonfiction and their various engagements with ontological and emotional dimensions of mixed-race subjectivities: I contrast the essay "Born Again Indian" (2010) by ...Canadian writer Dorothy Mills-Proctor with Scottish writer Jackie Kay's autobiography Red Dust Road (2011). The two writers share a biracial background (Mills-Proctor, black and Native; Kay, black and white) as well as the double displacement that comes from being women in a postcolonial context; therefore, both texts reveal similar representations of the function of the body as a signifier of race. These authors exploit the contingency inherent to racial attributions to create new readings of their racialized bodies and thus resist and redress colonial legacies of racism. Establishing a transatlantic dialogue between these authors and their coming to terms with (mixed-)race policies within the distinct spaces from which they write will illuminate some of the tendencies and directions that black Canadian writings currently exhibit.
The paper uses an interdisciplinary approach to analyse characteristic works by three contemporary British authors who come from different backgrounds but have all, in various ways, brought a ...performative perspective to bear on their poetry: Patience Agbabi, Jackie Kay, and Ben Mellor. The focus is on the concrete techniques which the poets use to construct different lyrical voices in the written texts as well as in performance. With their emphasis on difference(s), they seem to align themselves closely with broader literary and cultural developments like postmodernism or Stuart Hall’s ‘politics of representation,’ while nevertheless repeatedly suggesting the possibility of a unifying centre behind the text. All in all, the detailed analyses of the poems show the authors to take up different positions in the continuum between orality and writing, unity and diversity, as well as political intervention and playfulness.
This essay explores the continued circulation of modern metaphors of blood and blood-lines in diasporic literature and criticism. Drawing upon recent research into representations of adoption, it ...approaches diasporic thought through the critical lens of adoption studies in order to expose and question the problematic biocentric rendering of diasporic personhood which continues to keep aligned notions of cultural provenance with the alleged facticity of biogenetic origin. Beginning with the critique of blood mounted in the work of the mixed-race Canadian writer Lawrence Hill, it considers the tendency towards biocentrism which endangers the writing of Zadie Smith and Jane Jeong Trenka, before exploring Jackie Kay's attempt, itself not without problems, to conceive of biogenetic personhood beyond biocentrism, so that the dangerous "language of blood" is voided once and for all./ Cet article analyse la circulation continue des métaphores liées au sang et aux liens du sang dans la littérature et la critique diasporiques. En se fondant sur des recherches récentes sur la representation de l'adoption, il approche la pensée diasporique au travers du prisme des études sur l'adoption, pour mettre an jour et interroger les analyses biocentriques de la personne diasporique, analyses problematiques qui continuent de rabattre les notions de provenance culturelle sur la factualité supposée de l'origine biogénétique. Prenant comme point de depart la critique pro posée par Lawrence Hill, écrivain canadien métis, cet article considère la tendance au biocentrisme qui menace les écrits de Zadie Smith ou de Jane Jeong Trenka, avant de se porter sur la quête, elle-meme quelque peu problematique, d'une personne génétique au-dela du biocentrisme chez Jackie Kay, ce qui permet de dépasser une fois pour toutes la question du « langage du sang ».
Acclaimed publisher and editor Neil Astley, founder of Bloodaxe Books, guest-edits this special transatlantic all-poetry issue, featuring poets from North America, Great Britain, and Ireland. The ...issue contains a stirring diversity of work, with writers who have roots everywhere from Guyana to Pakistan to Zambia, and also features poetry in Welsh, Irish, and Scottish Gaelic. Much of the work is from accomplished British poets who are still little-known in the States. As Astley writes in his introduction, the issue aims to break down “the illogical divide between readerships on either side of the Atlantic,” and spark a conversation that will enliven and invigorate both poetic traditions.
This paper deals with the issue of fluid identity in the Scottish poet, novelist and dramatist Jackie Kay’s first poetry collection The Adoption Papers (1991). Having African roots and being adopted ...by a white Scottish family lead Kay to employ some elements from her real life in creating a sequence of poems that fictionalizes different manifestations of identity and shows their interplay and apparent contradictions at the same time. Kay views identity as a fluid flux that does not take a fixed form and that distances itself from any preconceptions because it is a continuous and changing formation. She negotiates, questions, fantasizes, reinvents, modifies, imagines, fictionalizes, synthesizes, and even lyricizes her different and multi-faceted identities in an open-ended poetic presentation.
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