In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Diaspora by Bus:Reginald McKnight, Postmodernism, and Transatlantic Subjectivity
  • Rolland Murray (bio)

In the 1980s, Evan Norris, the narrator of Reginald McKnight's novel I Get on the Bus (1990), crosses the Atlantic from America to Africa under the sway of political currents that propelled a critical strain of diasporic theory in the twentieth century. Influenced in part by his girlfriend Wanda, his "moral touchstone," Evan hopes that this transatlantic voyage will counter European designs "to keep the black diaspora from ever coming home to reclaim the power of familyhood" (165). Wanda employs familial rhetoric to encode a heroic pursuit of racial solidarity around the globe. No less alluring is this ideology's promise to reinvent Evan's identity by positioning him within a seamless continuum of kinship and communal belonging. Through its reinvention of the individual subject and the collective consciousness of thediaspora, this paradigm powerfully challenges European hegemony.

Wanda's labor to politicize Evan's identity evokes the concern with literal and symbolic returns to Africa that has become a sine qua non in the thought of diasporic activists and aesthetes. While black Atlantic discourse, broadly construed, has undoubtedly been characterized by disparate, competing agendas, redemptive homecoming has been reproduced across social divides in a way that warrants framing it as an ideological dominant within transatlantic modernity. Stuart Hall evocatively refers to traditional returns as a "oneness" that provides a people with "stable unchanging and continuous frames of reference and meaning, beneath the shifting divisions and vicissitudes of actual history" ("Cultural Identity" 393). [End Page 46] According to more than one genealogy, modern ideologies of homecoming can be traced back to nineteenth-century repatriation agendas articulated by black elites including Alexander Crummell and E. W. Blyden.1 These Atlantic world figures imagined that in returning to Africa, black Westerners would bring modernity and Western civilization to the "dark continent." Crummell captures their missionary fervor in his claim that "although born in the United States . . . I should think myself privileged . . . [to spend] the small measure of [my] ability . . . in efforts for the salvation of those to whom I am connected by descent in that benighted land" (qtd. in Adeleke 74–75). The repatriation agenda that began in the nineteenth century achieved the qualities of a modern mass movement in the 1920s under the leadership of Marcus Garvey. Certainly, Garvey's internationalism broke with its predecessors in its more acute focus on capitalist business ventures such as his ill-fated shipping company, the Black Star Line. Still, in his call to redeem "our Motherland Africa" and "found there a government, a nation of our own, strong enough to lend protection to the members of our race scattered all over the world" (52), Garvey shared his forerunners' insistence that New World blacks would be the primary leaders in introducing modernity to an otherwise premodern continent. As he phrases it, if "native Africans are unable to appreciate the value of their own country from the standard of Western civilization, then it is for us, their brothers, to take to them the knowledge and information that they need to help to develop the country for the common good" (67). Few subsequent political actors have gone so far as to echo these civilizing agendas, yet activists such as Ron Karenga and Molefi Asante have claimed that returning to the cultural traditions of Africa would provide a liberating antidote to the strictures of white supremacy. In the heyday of the black power movement, Karenga's influential US organization posited that only by affirming their ties to African language, dress, and culture could black Americans free themselves from the psychological damage caused by European domination. As Karenga averred: "We don't borrow from Africa. We utilize that which was ours to start with. [End Page 47] The culture provides the bases for revolution and recovery" (7).2 For Karenga and his followers, this therapeutic reclamation had to take place "before we succeed politically" (7). Moreover, a direct genealogy can be traced from Karenga to the contemporary Afrocentric politics of figures like Asante who had ties to US (Howe 215–16). In a characteristic formulation, Asante writes that his project is "about taking the globe and turning...

pdf