Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature by Yogita Goyal (review)

Africa is a charged symbol in Black Diaspora studies. In Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature, Goyal argues that the vibrant black Atlantic scholarship of the last fifteen years tends to oversimplify or ignore the meaning of Africa in its debates. Since the publication of Paul Gilroy’s groundbreaking The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), scholars have seized this theoretical model for their book titles and as the organizing principle of their research, and yet failed to reach a consensus on the borders of this conceptual framework. As Jonathan Elmer pointedly asks, “What exactly, is the ‘black Atlantic’?” Situating what she calls the “sign of Africa” at the center of her work and debunking the image of Africa as a “dark” mythical past, Goyal theorizes that Africa is “constitutive of black modernity” (7). This engaging book argues that Gilroy’s black Atlantic, which shuns “the continuing lure of ethnic absolutism” and focuses on hybridity, “leaves little room for Africa” (225). Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature poses the crucial question: What is Africa to the black Atlantic?

In the book’s introduction, Goyal suggests that Africa powers the imagination and political vision of two key diasporic figures: Marcus Garvey and Frantz Fanon. Goyal sets out to “excavate a larger tradition of diasporic debate over Africa” by focusing on “three distinct features of their imagination—the synthesis of national and transnational concerns, the centrality of Africa, and the significance of romance and realism” (7). Goyal links Garvey’s grandiloquent language and theatricality with diasporic romance and Fanon’s focus on revolution with nationalist realism. While the book’s main argument hinges on the distinction between the literary genres of realism and romance, Goyal announces that this is not a book concerned with the definition of key terms. The terms diaspora and romance, for example, represent an “infinitely large body of intellectual work” and an “array of meanings” (13) with “untidy” distinctions between key words (55–56). Citing romance as the “paradigmatic genre of the diaspora” (14), this compelling investigation centers on “the ways in which romance produces Africa in the diasporic imagination” (10).

To explore the relationship between romance and the production of Africa, Goyal constructs a “black Atlantic canon” composed of the writings (magazine fiction, novels, philosophical texts) of black intellectuals from the United States, Britain, West Africa, and the Caribbean from the late-nineteenth century to the late-twentieth century. These authors include Pauline Hopkins, Caryl Phillips, W. E. B. Du Bois, Joseph Casely Hayford, Marcus Garvey, Chinua Achebe, Richard Wright, Frantz Fanon, and Ama Ata Aidoo. With theory and close readings meticulously interwoven, Goyal develops a nuanced argument that links literary genre with theories of diaspora and the black Atlantic over six chapters. One of the book’s strongest claims is that diaspora does not discard the nation; that is, “nation and diaspora are mutually constitutive” (16). Much of Goyal’s book coheres around exposing the places where “broad oppositions fail to capture the nuances” of complex ideas such as tradition, the nation, the “sign of Africa,” the West, the black Atlantic world, the colonial encounter, diaspora, pan-Africanism, etc. (106). It is surprising, then, that Goyal organizes each chapter title around a dichotomous relationship between two key terms, reinforcing these oppositions.

Arranged in chronological order, the first two chapters begin with readings of early-twentieth-century texts. Chapter 1 “From domestic allegory to imperial romance: Pauline Hopkins and racial mixture” reads Hopkins’s 1903 Of One Blood as an “imperial romance” of Africa promoting racial purity, a significant departure, Goyal notes, from the celebration of mixed-race characters in Hopkins’s early work. The book’s second and longest chapter, “From double consciousness to diaspora: W. E. B. Du Bois and black internationalism” explores the classic 1903 The Souls of Black Folk and the 1928 fictional text, Dark Princess. Goyal argues that Du Bois vacillated “between realism and romance to articulate African American identity as marked by double consciousness, he also theorized Africa as both the...