UCLA

My project broadens the generative and growing field of Middle Passage Studies by prioritizing and conceptualizing literary representations of womanhood alongside Atlantic enslavement through four highly acclaimed novels including Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow (1983), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1988). All written by black female writers, they align themselves with, are compelled to or inspired by narratives of transatlantic slavery and imagine how Africas (as homelands, sites of origin, spaces of belonging, places of psychic freedom and physical mobility) are activated and performed throughout the diaspora. Every female protagonist across these works undergoes processes of purging and catharsis through modalities of crossing, fight, and flight dependent on their individual moment of rupture, embodiment or becoming. I contend that these meditations and mediations of brutal migratory movements trace social conditions, centuries old yearnings, melancholy and mourning of returning home or to mother-like lands—unmarked places on a map in the American South, remote islands and enclaves, international locales or imaginary places completely outside the realm of geography and the Americas. By staging an encounter between fictional black post-emancipation subjects, the Atlantic Ocean and the Americas, I construct a triangular cartography of cultural exchange centering black female transatlantic literature as integral to the small, generative and emerging corpus of Middle Passage Studies. Within all four diasporic novels, is the belief that there exists a place in the world that is free of racism, colorism, classism, sexism, and capitalism that maps a new world within the imagination and has the power to transform individual realities whether on land, in the air or at sea.