Racial Poetics in The Black Atlantic: A STUDY of Nadine Gordimer’s None to Accompany Me and Caryl Phillips’ Cambridge

  • Derick J. Mbungang Higher Teachers Training College (HTTC) University of Bamenda, Cameroon
Keywords: Race, Black Atlantic, black, white

Abstract

The perception of the nature and function of race in history is reflected in literature. Race being the source of all structures of feeling and thought gave rise to racism in societies where, because of the cohabitation of races, natives, white settlers and slaves were finally compelled to live together. Consequently, the history of the races gave birth to racial struggle. Evidence of this struggle is the Civil Rights Movement andthe Black Lives Matterinsurgency in the United States of America and beyond, the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa,but also the Black Aesthetics in African American Literature. It is against this backdrop that this study seeks to examine the meaning of blackness in two multiracial societies, one with a history of colonialism and the other with a history of slavery. Through the theoretical lens of new historicism, the paper demonstrates that the Black Atlantic offers the occasion for the exploration of race as a legacy of the clash between the West and the New World in order to reveal not only the commonalities of its racial dynamics but also the complementarities existing between different races. Using Nadine Gordimer‟s None to Accompany Me and Caryl Phillips‟ Cambridge as corpus, the paper concludes that both authors exemplify and contribute to discourses on race by narrating the complementary histories of black characters.

References

Butler, Judith.Bodies That Matter. On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex'. London: Routledge, 1993.

Fanon, Frantz.Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove, 1967.

Gates, Henry Louis. Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self. New York: Oxford University Press. 1987

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.

Gordimer, Nadine. None to Accompany Me. Penguin Books. 1994.

Kruks, Sonia.Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001.

Phillips, Caryl. Cambridge.London: Bloomsbury, 1991.

Sartre, Jean Paul. “Black Orpheus”. Translated by John MacCombie. The Massachusetts Review 6, No.1 (1965): 13-52.

Winant, Howard.The New Politics of Race. Globalism, Difference, Justice.University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2004.

Published
2021-04-27
How to Cite
[1]
Derick J. Mbungang 2021. Racial Poetics in The Black Atlantic: A STUDY of Nadine Gordimer’s None to Accompany Me and Caryl Phillips’ Cambridge. International Journal on Integrated Education. 4, 4 (Apr. 2021), 208-213. DOI:https://doi.org/10.17605/ijie.v4i4.1663.
Section
Articles