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Where Is the Love? Race, Self-Exile, and a Kind of Reconciliation
- Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies
- University of Toronto Press
- Volume 21, Number 1, Spring 2021
- pp. 27-46
- Article
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Abstract:
Cultivating solidarity or love for community for those systematically abused by the state and its civic community is a longstanding challenge. While the latter should primarily shoulder responsibility for (re)building trust, this article focuses on the abused self-exile's agency and possible reasons for return. To understand possible motivations for (re)engagement, this article explores the African American expatriate experience rendered in fiction and criticism. It focuses specifically on William Gardner Smith's The Stone Face and its portrait of the potentialities of Black love as a vehicle of social resurrection and the exercise of political power.