Performing Childhood in Diaspora: Palimpsestic Bodies and Agency in Contemporary Black Diasporic Literature

This dissertation examines the complex role of the black child protagonists who emerge so prominently in contemporary black diasporic fictions published from the 1970s to the early 21st century. In literatures published after mid-1960s when former European colonies achieved independence and African Americans successfully won Civil Rights, African and African American authors mobilized the figure of children as active agents that address the various issues of their national or cultural identities. Focus on black children is particularly timely and bears significance for two reasons. Firstly, black populations have been identified and imagined as a child waiting to be protected and educated by Western fathers in the histories of colonialism and slavery. How this cliched representation, a stereotypical image used to advance colonial control and support slavery, could be questioned and challenged through literary representation has yet to be fully engaged. This dissertation contends that the child-figures are particularly apt vehicles for the contemporary diasporic authors to delineate the processes of diasporic or post-colonial identity formation, or the state of “becoming” in Stuart Hall’s sense. Put differently, the child figures in contemporary black diasporic literatures embody creative futurity while inheriting the traumatic experiences of colonial and racist oppression over history. Secondly, they allow writers to address complex global issues of the twentieth-first century such as poverty, wars, child soldiers, slavery, racial profiling, and police brutality that are often related to the violation of children ’s human rights. Giving special attention to the relationship between the children’s memories and bodies in the context of the globalized network of violence and oppression, this dissertation will investigate four texts; Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991), Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), Chris Abani’s Song for Night (2007), and Octavia Butler’s Fledgling (2005). Unlike the “innocent” white children who often embody a “tabula rasa,” a figuration of forgetting or amnesiac condition and by extension promise of futurity, the black male and female children in these novels feature “palimpsestically” to restore memories and histories of their ancestors (or theirs). In the context of the necro-political turn of contemporary world, which intensifies and extends the institutions of slavery and colonialism, these children are positioned as vulnerable and subject to the power of death and terror. However, their palimpsestic memories serve as great resources for them to use in order to survive, resist, and even execute revenge.

Grantor dc:publisher

State University of New York at Buffalo

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Okajima, Kei

Contributors dc:contributor

• Winter, Kari
• Transnational Studies - American Studies
• Africana and American Studies

• African American studies
• African literature
• American literature

Statement dc:rights

• Users of works found in University at Buffalo Institutional Repository (UBIR) are responsible for identifying and contacting the copyright owner for permission to reuse. University at Buffalo Libraries do not manage rights for copyright-protected works and cannot assist with permissions.
• Copyright retained by author.

Language dc:language

eng

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/10477/78001

OAI record oai:identifier

https://ubir.buffalo.edu/oai/request?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=qdc&identifier=oai%3Aubir.buffalo.edu%3A10477%2F78001