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.
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.
AN INTERVIEW WITH JACKIE KAY Rowell, Charles Henry; KAY, JACKIE
Callaloo,
04/2014, Letnik:
37, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Rowell interviews Jackie Kay, a Scottish poet and novelist. Among other things, Kay talks about what "identity politics" means in the setting of Northern England and in Scotland where she was born ...and how she shifts from writing poetry and writing fiction.
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