The African Atlantic: West African Literatures and Slavery Studies

SLAVERY STUDIES, COLONIALISM, AND AFRICAN LITERATURES

Within African literary and cultural studies, work on the representations of domestic West African slavery or the historical slave trades across the Atlantic and the Sahara has been sparse. Laura Murphy and Matthew Christensen address this paucity in two books with strikingly different perspectives and outcomes. Whereas Murphy focuses on metaphorization and veiled communications in representations of slavery, Christensen emphasizes direct contestations of slavery’s meanings and overt appropriations of symbolic narratives and icons that critique enslavement and its legacies of political and cultural dispossession. In his explicitly transnational study, Christensen examines the memorializations of the 1839 Amistad slave revolt in the United States and Sierra Leone as a site of contestation over the meanings of emancipation and political independence. Murphy studies representations of the slave trade in Ghanaian and Nigerian literatures. Both scholars examine texts and events from about the third decade of the nineteenth century to the first decade of the twenty-first century.

In reading these contributions together, I frame my observations within an appraisal of the disjunctures among a globalizing slavery studies, African literary scholarship, studies of slavery narratives in the North Atlantic world, and the much researched study of slavery in the Americas. This wide gesture is necessary because as much as these books can be read as studies in African and African American literatures, they beckon toward larger cross-disciplinary conversations about the histories and representations of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism. Hitherto, most of the work on slavery in Africa has been produced outside literary scholarship. Such work, produced by historians, anthropologists, political scientists, legal scholars, and archeologists on the historical and contemporary practices of capture, enslavement, and bondage constitutes the cross-disciplinary field of slavery studies. Although much of the work in the field through the last three decades of the twentieth century was historical, the rise of contemporary slavery studies, the attention to human trafficking, and the increasing recognition of globalized labor exploitation have transformed historical slavery studies into contemporary global slavery studies. Increasingly, the slave trade is recognized as a globalizing force with multiple historical locations and participants. New and forthcoming journals and book series—such as the Journal of Global Slavery or Brill’s Studies in Global Slavery—continue to transform the field. It is thus imperative for scholars to historicize their studies of any form of slavery and slave trade within a larger landscape and temporality of co-extensive practices of enslavement and freedom.

The transformations I list above influence my reading of Murphy and Christensen. While a simple Google search will reveal countless conferences and publications on the histories and forms of slavery and bondage in Africa, it will produce far fewer search results on the representations of slavery in African literatures. This disjuncture is historical. Slavery, the Atlantic slave trade, and abolition are acknowledged as catastrophic and traumatic events in Caribbean and American literatures. Hence, scholars studying representations of slavery in the Americas find a ready body of codified literatures overtly addressing its traumatic legacies. There is also a great interaction between scholars of Caribbean and American literatures of slavery and scholars of slavery studies in the Americas. Colonial conquest reconfigured Africa’s internal relationship to domestic slavery and the internal slave trades such that scholars of slavery in African literatures must take into account how colonialism impacted how slavery is remembered and represented. That is to say that all accounts of slavery and slave trade must be provincialized, i.e., taken out of any singularizing (North Atlantic or putatively global) narrative and rescaled within a local nexus of meanings and historical mechanisms.¹ For West African literatures, such provincializing gestures must take account of colonialism and its successor or related projects such as anticolonialism, independence, arrested decolonization...