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Legba's crossing : narratology in the African Atlantic
Title
Legba's crossing : narratology in the African Atlantic / Heather Russell.
ISBN
0820328677
9780820338798
0820338796
9780820328676
9780820338798
Publication
Athens : University of Georgia Press, [2009]
Copyright Notice Date
©2009
Physical Description
1 online resource (xi, 202 pages)
Local Notes
Access is available to the Yale community.
Notes
Electronic text and image data. Ann Arbor, Mich. : University of Michigan, Michigan Publishing, 2022. EPUB file. ([ACLS Humanities E-Book])
Access and use
Access restricted by licensing agreement.
Summary
In Haiti, Papa Legba is the spirit whose permission must be sought to communicate with the spirit world. He stands at and for the crossroads of language, interpretation, and form and is considered to be like the voice of a god. This book examines how writers from the United States and the anglophone Caribbean challenge conventional Western narratives through innovative use, disruption, and reconfiguration of form. It analyzes the work of James Weldon Johnson, Audre Lorde, Michelle Cliff, Earl Lovelace, and John Edgar Wideman in light of the West African aesthetic principle of ashe, a quality ascribed to art that transcends the prescribed boundaries of form. Ashe is linked to the characteristics of improvisation and flexibility that are central to jazz and other art forms. The author argues that African Atlantic writers self-consciously and self-reflexively manipulate dominant forms that prescribe a certain trajectory of, for example, enlightenment, civilization, or progress. She connects this seemingly postmodern meta-analysis to much older West African philosophy and its African Atlantic iterations, which she calls "the Legba Principle."
Variant and related titles
ACLS Humanities E-Book.
Format
Books / Online
Language
English
Added to Catalog
February 15, 2023
Series
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents
Introduction: Critical paradigms in race, nation, and narratology
pt. 1. Interruptions. Race, citizenship, and form : James Weldon Johnson's The autobiography of an ex-colored man ; The poetics of biomythography : the work of Audre Lorde
pt. 2. Disruptions. Race, nation, and the imagination : Michelle Cliff's No telephone to heaven ; Jazz imaginings of the nation-state : Earl Lovelace's Salt
pt. 3. Eruptions. Dis-ease, de-formity, and diaspora : John Edgar Wideman's The cattle killing
Conclusion: Dialectics of globalization, development, and discourse.
Subjects
Also listed under
American Council of Learned Societies.
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