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Current Writing: Text and

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Introduction: African
shores and transatlantic
interlocutions
a
Thomas Olver & Stephan Meyer
a
Language Centre and to the Centre of Gender
Studies, University of Basel

Available online: 01 Jun 2011

To cite this article: Thomas Olver & Stephan Meyer (2004): Introduction: African
shores and transatlantic interlocutions, Current Writing: Text and Reception in
Southern Africa, 16:2, 1-17

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 Introduction: African Shores and Trans-
atlantic Interlocutions
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Thomas Olver and Stephan Meyer

When delegates to the South Africa – African Union – Caribbean Diaspora

Conference met in Kingston Jamaica in March 2005, they officially reasserted
the continued significance of an enduring black Atlantic conversation.
Addressing the participants on the contemporary relevance of Pan-
Africanism, Pallo Jordan, for example, sketched a narrative of emancipation
weaving together diverse histories from various Atlantic shores. “Haiti, an
African nation in the Caribbean,” he stated “lit the torch of African freedom
two centuries ago. That torch was passed on from Toussaint l’Ouverture to
Henry Sylvester Williams ninety six years later; it was carried across the
finishing line by Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela ninety four years later. When
Mandela was sworn in as South Africa’s first democratically elected Head
of State in 1994, in every part of the world his inauguration was hailed as
marking the official end of the system of institutionalized racism that had
assailed the dignity and human worth of every person of African descent for
the previous five hundred years of interaction between Europeans and
Africans” (Jordan 2005).1
The exchanges between southern African and other interlocutors Jordan
refers to are indeed vigorous, broad and longstanding. Since the nineteenth
century, Africans such as Tiyo Soga and Pixley ka Isaka Seme have been
engaging with the ideas of Martin Delany and Alexander Crummell. The
interactions between WEB Du Bois and Solomon T Plaatje and between
Langston Hughes and the generation of Peter Abrahams are equally well
documented. Southern African performers were visible in Britain as early as
the nineteenth century and included the coerced (such as Sara Baartman) as
well as those who travelled by free choice (such as Peter Lobengula and the
African Choir). Likewise, the importance of music and cinema, from the USA
to the Sophiatown Renaissance of the 1950s, is undisputed. Politically, the

CURRENT WRITING 16(2) 2004 ISSN 1013-929X 1

 Thomas Olver and Stephan Meyer

struggle against apartheid reverberated throughout the black Atlantic in the

person of figures such as Charlotte Maxeke and Mandela (who has maintained
an iconic status in the North Atlantic for decades, recently reaffirmed by his
position in the Make Poverty History campaign). Finally, the reciprocal
influence of intellectuals from different locations around the Atlantic, such
as Franz Fanon and Es’kia Mphahlele, is constantly referred to, with recent
visits to South Africa by Henry Louis Gates Jnr, Cornel West and Paul Gilroy
testifying to unabating black Atlantic exchanges.2
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Given this range of interaction, it is perplexing that Paul Gilroy’s theoretical

reflections on the black Atlantic have elicited relatively little response from
southern African scholars. There is a puzzling tension between the
broadening of his scholarship from black culture in Britain to the black
Atlantic and then to a postracial cosmopolitan world, and the comparatively
low level of engagement with his ideas in southern African literary studies,
particularly as practised by southern Africans themselves. That Gilroy is
well attuned to larger issues beyond the insular spaces of his home bases
in Britain and the United States is evident from his many references to other
sites, including South Africa, which he already alludes to in his first book
(1987:158) and to which he returns time and again, as for example in remarks
on Mandela’s inaugural speech (2000:110-111). Notwithstanding his status
as one of the most prolific and esteemed scholars of black cultural studies
in the North Atlantic, his interdisciplinarity and his transnational approach
(evident in the cues he drops regarding South Africa throughout his work),
Gilroy’s ideas have evoked little response on the African shores of the South
Atlantic, and local scholars have hardly responded to the implicit invitations
to a conversation.3
Bar a few passing quotes, asides or perfunctory footnotes, there has been
no sustained exchange rooted in southern Africa writing on the issues Gilroy
raises. An early treatment of Es’kia Mphahlele’s fiction in the light of
Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, Percy Mabogo More’s “Hegel, the Black
Atlantic and Mphahlele” (1994), produced disappointingly little response.
Also, most local references to Gilroy are outside literary studies.4 Furthermore,
the literary critics who do refer to Gilroy seldom venture beyond his classic
The Black Atlantic, disregarding his other books, which are also of relevance
for literary scholars. Probably the most concrete indicator of the surprisingly
low level of conversation with Gilroy in local scholarship has been the
response to this special issue of Current Writing. The editors were inundated
by submissions from the North Atlantic, most of which did not take an

2
 Introduction

African perspective on Gilroy’s work and were therefore not included in this
issue, which specifically seeks to explore ways in which (southern) African
literary and cultural studies engage with Gilroy’s work. Those contributors
who did make a clear South African connection are virtually all South
Africans who were or still are attached to institutions in the North Atlantic.
It seems that the implied call addressed to scholars in Louis Chude-
Sokei’s remark that “Gilroy is clearing space for future inquiry and pointing
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in a variety of intriguing and relevant directions. … The text is rife with

suggestions for further study (1996:745) is only very gradually beginning
to elicit a response from southern Africans. An important development in
this direction has been the recent special issue of Scrutiny2, “Black Atlantic
Sound” (2004), edited by Michael Titlestad. The power of that collection lies
not only in the use it makes of diverse trends in black Atlantic studies for
an analysis of southern African culture, but in its particular focus on sound,
especially music and film. While “Black Atlantic Sound” marks some steps
towards an emergent theoretical conversation, the relatively limited southern
African engagement with The Black Atlantic is still outbalanced by the
significance of black diasporic culture to southern Africans and of southern
African culture to the black Atlantic.
This sparseness of southern African participation in critical reflection on
black Atlantic interlocutions demands both an explanation and correction.
Focussing initially and more specifically on The Black Atlantic, two sets of
explanations can be offered for the lack of local engagement with Gilroy’s
work. The first explanation relates to the fault lines of dissemination; ie the
distribution and reception via the global teaching machine that establishes
hegemonic circuits of knowledge production and reproduction. In Paul
Zeleza’s words, Gilroy’s book is “a tribute as much to the seductive power
of African American expressive culture itself, including the very notions of
diaspora or blackness, as to the hegemony of US imperialism, on whose
multinational corporate wings it is marketed to the rest of the world”
(2005:37). In other words, Zeleza reminds us that knowledge, like the
exponents of black Atlantic literatures, often travels along curious routes,
and that the routes of knowledge are maps of power. Mapping the
intersections between these global and local networks of knowledge
production, which determine that The Black Atlantic should find such a
ready audience in many other locations and so little response in southern
Africa, would go a long way in explaining the local deficit.
The second set of explanations for the rather limited and belated reception

3
 Thomas Olver and Stephan Meyer

of The Black Atlantic in (southern) Africa centres on features inherent to

this work. The comparatively disproportionate appeal of Gilroy’s ideas to
North Atlantic scholarship and the vibrant debates they trigger there could
be partly explained by the centrality they grant to the experience of and
intellectual engagement with being black in the West. Thus Chude-Sokei
writes: “because his examples are almost all drawn from that New York/
London nexus, one wonders about the ‘real’ Africa and its response to the
issues and concerns that Gilroy suggests are trans-Atlantic. One would
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expect that a text boasting a focus on diaspora would take Africa and its
contemporary critical and cultural traditions a bit more seriously” (1996:743).
A solution to this deficit has come in a rare article by the anthropologist
Charles Piot (2001). Concluding an exemplary investigation of the slave trade
and the circulation of commodities in the Atlantic triangle, Piot writes:
Black Atlantic studies can only be enhanced by including rather than
excluding Africa and exploring the complex traffic in meanings that has
long circulated throughout this Atlantic world and produced crosshatched
histories of the black modern. Far from unidirectional, these meanings
have circulated promiscuously from Africa to the Americas and Europe,
and from Europe and the Americas back to Africa, thoroughly remaking
all parties in the process. If the burden of my essay has been to suggest
that Atlanticists pay more attention to Africa (and to show that the
cultural histories they write are not only similar but also tied to those
of the African mainland), it should also be clear that I aim as well to prod
Africanists into taking the work of Atlantic scholars like Gilroy more
seriously. For Gilroy’s work not only provides models of cultural
process that are useful in analyzing cultures on the mainland but also
enables us to (re)conceptualize culture across vast oceanic spaces. The
category ‘black Atlantic’ thus provokes us to think more expansively
about the units of analysis we employ, in the process providing fertile
ground for reimagining area studies beyond the old parochialisms.
(2001:168-169)
As Chude-Sokei and Piot indicate, there is a serious worry about the level
and nature of attention some black Atlanticists devote to Africa, leading to
accusations of black Euro-centrism or Northern-centrism.5 This worry is
rooted in the suspicion that Gilroy’s North Atlantic bias is not just the result
of his scholarly interest in that region; rather it reflects an underlying
conviction that black modernity is really a North Atlantic concern. In Laura
Chrisman’s words, certain proponents of black Atlanticism (unintentionally)
“give primacy to diasporic Africans as the exemplars of modernity that
Africans seek to emulate” (2002:1). As the title of Zine Magubane’s (2003)

4
 Introduction

article “The Influence of African American Cultural Practices on South

Africa, 1890-1990” suggests, some black Atlanticists often prioritise the
flow from black diasporic cultures to southern Africa. In fact, Magubane’s
article contradicts expectations raised by the title; she actually shows that
local engagements with the North Atlantic and with modernity in general are
not passive and receptive, but vigorously transformative. As a result,
possibly the most important road-clearing exchange needed to enable a more
extensive engagement with black Atlanticism from a southern African
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perspective is a clarification of Gilroy’s notion of modernity and its location.

The suspicion of black Euro-centrism or Northern-centrism in The Black
Atlantic has various sources. To begin with, Gilroy does not explicitly state
to what extent he considers modernity a local or a global phenomenon.
Formulations, such as his call to “shift the centre of debate away from
Europe, to look at other more peripheral encounters with modernity”
(1993a:108; emphasis added) concede that modernity is not a solely European
or North Atlantic phenomenon. Yet his formulation insists that modernity
is centred on the North Atlantic. While Gilroy thus acknowledges the
existence of “more peripheral encounters with modernity,” he clearly stops
short of the position expounded by Enrique Dussel (1998), that modernity
actually emerged in the so-called peripheries. Furthermore, there is some
ambivalence in Gilroy’s position, evident from the way in which, in the
opening pages of The Black Atlantic, he juggles the fuzzy spatial notion of
the West in relation to a set of ideas associated with the Enlightenment. At
times he adheres to a geographically unbounded conception of modernity
and sees himself grappling with the ways in which black writers respond to
the Enlightenment (1993a:ix). But mostly his engagement with modernity
leans towards Europe and “the West” (1993a:1). Finally, the conjunction
between Gilroy’s thesis that racial slavery constitutes the definitive moment
of modernity and the relative weight he grants to the analysis of the counter
culture produced by slaves and their descendants in the North Atlantic
within modernity can be construed to imply that black modernity is eminently
enshrined in the writings of Africans in the diaspora.
If black modernity were indeed only a diasporic achievement, then
Gilroy’s geo-cultural focus on the North Atlantic diaspora would disqualify
a broadening by simple addition of an African supplement. In this case, one
could at best argue that a comprehensive black Atlanticism should include
the African hinterland of slavery (see Sparks 2004 and Bailey 2005). However,
even extending the account one offers of modernity to the African dimension

5
 Thomas Olver and Stephan Meyer

of slavery running up to the middle of the nineteenth century may still be too
limiting, because it would neglect the ongoing imbrication of Africa with
modernity. If, instead, one follows Dussel in the view that modernity
emerges at the encounter between African, American and European
civilisations on the Atlantic, black modernity is much broader than the
traumatic history of slavery and it is then seen to have many inflections
(compare Gaonkar 2001 and Meyer and Olver 2002). Put metaphorically: black
Atlantic modernity has many shores. In other words, Euro-modernity is not
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modernity per se; there is no master-modernity, only many local versions of

it.
Interpreted thus, Gilroy can be seen to be dealing primarily with one of
the inflections of modernity – namely the North Atlantic one – which is the
point of arrival of abducted, displaced and dispersed Africans. Indeed, he
does offer astute analyses of the place of Africans in the social and symbolic
order in Britain and the USA; how they were and are represented; and how,
in particular, they engaged and still engage in contesting these representations
themselves. The North Atlantic focus can then be seen as an act of
considered academic modesty informed by a theoretical premise. Gilroy’s
conviction that “there is no racism in general and consequently there can be
no general theory of race relations or race and politics” (1993a:22) goes
together with an application of his theoretical acumen to a specific field and
a refusal to overstretch its application. The view that modernity has various
inflections should therefore be seen as an invitation to scholars intimately
familiar with the particularities of (southern) African societies to develop
their own accounts of the specific local inflections of modernity.
Given the differences between diasporic, colonial and postcolonial
experiences, it is not surprising that neither Gilroy nor southern Africans
makes the same immediate connections to the experience and literary
heritage which engages most black Atlantic scholarship. Because the black
Atlantic has many shores, and because of the ongoing dissection of the
literary landscape along the borders of the political unit of the nation-state,
many southern Africans still consider diasporic culture and writing part of
the literary heritage of faraway countries in the North Atlantic. According
to this reading, the Atlantic separates, and diasporic writings are only
regarded relevant to the study of the literatures of distant shores. For
scholars who study North Atlantic literatures and cultures as distant
artefacts that should be valued for what they tell us about those distant
cultures, Gilroy’s work has the advantage that it brings into the foreground

6
 Introduction

an often still compartmentalised or marginalised body of work by black

writers and a perspective which prioritises race. In this sense, his work can
be seen as a contribution to the longstanding history of black cultures in the
USA and Europe. Whilst Gilroy’s book primarily contributed to the
transnationalisation of black American Studies, a line also pursued by
scholars such as Vincent Carretta (2001), it has likewise contributed to the
realignment of scholarship on black culture and literature in Britain, stretching
from the eighteenth and nineteenth century writings of Ignatius Sancho,
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Olaudah Equiano and Mary Prince (Carretta 2000; Walvin 2000; Rice 2003;
Carey, Ellis, and Salih 2004) to contemporary writers such as Andrea Levy
and Zadie Smith.
However, if we start looking at diasporic, colonial and postcolonial
cultures as a range of experiences within modernity, the Atlantic does not
only separate, it also connects different shores. According to such a
reading, interconnections may become as important as the divergences.
This would open the way for greater borrowing and strengthening of the ties
between diasporic and post/colonial literatures and scholarship under the
rubric of black Atlantic modernity. Still, this cannot simply take the form of
transporting some of Gilroy’s analyses to southern Africa. The pursuit of a
localised account of modernity in conversation with interlocutors on other
Atlantic shores obviously needs to be context-sensitive, taking into
consideration different histories, demographics and geographic locations,
with the economic and political implications this infers. Some of the points
Courtney Jung (1999) and Rita Barnard (2005) raise regarding comparisons
between South Africa and the United States also apply in this case, even
though what is being advocated here is an overarching framework of
interpretation rather than a set of comparisons as such. It cannot be denied
that advocating a specific framework within which texts and other cultural
artefacts may be studied supposes or imposes a measure of relevance to each
other amongst the texts thus grouped. And it is possible that alternative
frameworks and implied comparisons (eg the relationship between southern
African literature and literature from other parts of Africa treated in the
“Return to Africa” theme issue of Current Writing 11(2) October 1999, or the
relationship between southern African and Indian literature as examined in
the 1999 Re-locating literature: Africa and India conference held at Wits) may
be more or equally relevant. Indeed, the location of southern Africa in Africa
and on the Indian Ocean does invite the aforementioned frameworks and
comparisons. But they do not exclude the possibility of linking these other

7
 Thomas Olver and Stephan Meyer

interpretative frameworks to a third one, namely that of black Atlantic

modernity, also suggested by our location on the Atlantic Ocean.
From an Afrocentric perspective, the integration of literature and culture
rooted in Africa into the framework of black Atlanticism may be rejected
rather than welcomed on the grounds that the former is incommensurable
with the writing of dispersal and displacement of the diaspora. This distinction
between Africa and the diaspora in fact echoes a distinction Gilroy himself
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draws between roots and routes. Whereas Gilroy makes this distinction in
order to prioritise routes and displacement, his detractors fault him exactly
on this point, prioritising roots instead. But the assumed rift between the
routed and the rooted, which the parties to this altercation share, is open to
challenge. To begin with, this dichotomy disregards the actual, existing
influences and linkages between diasporic and non-diasporic African cultures
that existed and still persist through the exchange of persons and goods
mentioned above. Such dichotomisation also disregards the nature of the
public sphere. In its modern transnational form, the addressees of texts,
sounds and images are increasingly a potentially limitless community that
does not inhabit the same communitarian space as its authors (The Black
Public Sphere Collective 1995, Fraser 2005). Consequently, the rooted need
not leave home to be in contact with the routed and vice-versa.
The reason for the Afrocentric insistence on the distinction probably
derives from the higher value that black Atlanticists ascribe to diasporic
culture as well as the impression they create that New African modernity
derived from New Negro modernity. However, in her analysis of the
relationship between Plaatje and Du Bois, Laura Chrisman illustrates that it
is possible to work within a black Atlantic framework without thereby
granting the routed priority over the rooted. On the contrary, she demonstrates
that New African modernity is not a derivative of New Negro modernity; it
is a “pro-active and critical transatlantic interlocutor, rather than emulator”
(Chrisman 2002). In fact, Chrisman shows that Plaatje’s keen awareness of
the different inflections of modernity means that he takes a distinctly radical,
collectivist and materialist approach to social transformation and the role of
literature in it, an approach thoroughly informed by his South African
context. Because of the dominance of the unidirectionalist view, an important
aspect in the ongoing pursuit of the longstanding black Atlantic dialogue
is to explore the distinctive contributions (southern) Africans make to this
engagement.
So far, the focus has been on the ways in which (southern) African

8
 Introduction

scholars may engage with Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic. However, this would
be a rather restrictive exchange, given his extensive body of work. The
opening for debate his other writings offer to (southern) African scholars
is implied by the development mentioned in his oeuvre towards an ever-
larger field of analysis. Moving from a localised (but not insular) focus on
Britain in There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack, his project expands to the
predominantly North Atlantic in The Black Atlantic and Small Acts, and
then circles out even further to territories as diverse as Germany, Namibia,
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the USA and South Africa in Between Camps, after which it returns to Britain
placed in a post-imperial world in After Empire.
It is not only the expanded geo-cultural scope of this larger body of work
that brings it closer to southern African scholars. More importantly, it is the
growing crystallisation of the notion of postracial cosmopolitanism, which
comes to fruition in Between Camps. In advocating such a postracial
cosmopolitanism, Gilroy clearly addresses a global community in a manner
which also invites conversations with African scholars. One may speculate
that it is the very advocacy of a postracial cosmopolitan utopia and planetary
humanism which provokes such a stunned silence from his potential local
interlocutors, based upon sheer incomprehension or outright rejection,
especially by those who believe in the ontological existence or political
significance of races and nations. As with Between Camps, one would
expect that the topic which Gilroy deals with in After Empire, namely coming
to terms with the past, is of general interest to southern Africans. Clearly,
how the British come to terms with their past is of no little consequence to
those who were once under the boot of Empire be it symbolically through
a formal apology for previous atrocities, culturally through self-reflective
writing, politically through recognition of the significance of Africa as a
political partner, or economically through restitution, aid and debt relief.
Our intention in advocating a deeper engagement between local and black
Atlantic scholarship is not to replicate a situation described by some as the
mimicking of New Negroes by New Africans. Instead, it is our desire to see
the flourishing of a debate in which (southern) African scholars continue in
the tradition of Plaatje as “pro-active and critical transatlantic interlocutor,
rather than emulator” (Chrisman 2002). We are convinced that the issues at
stake, such as the nature and unfulfilled promises of the unfinished project
of modernity; the im/possibility and the un/desirability of postracialism; and
the demands of nation building and cosmopolitanism; and the role of
literature and culture in relation to these issues deserve serious debate.

9
 Thomas Olver and Stephan Meyer

Granted, these issues are not foreign to local scholars. In fact, they are
recurrent. We hope that placing them in the framework of a black Atlantic
exchange may add to their vitality and contribute new perspectives on these
matters.
This special issue of Current Writing does not sufficiently correct the
deficit in the exchange between local literary and cultural studies and black
Atlantic scholars such as Paul Gilroy because it does not push ahead such
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work to the extent that we had anticipated it would. It is but one further
contribution in a longstanding conversation, which particularly seeks to
reflect on the southern African contributions to that paradigm. Nevertheless,
we trust that it will go some distance in further turning into reality the hope
which Michael Chapman expresses when surmising that “whatever the
limitations of the concept, the Black Atlantic has the potential to add energy
to the idea of Africa in the next, more global epoch” (2003:7).
***
In her article, Laura Chrisman continues her inquiries into the relationship
between Sol T Plaatje and WEB Du Bois. Whereas she previously argued
that Plaatje engaged with Du Bois as interlocutor rather than emulator, the
present contribution explains why Du Bois failed to respond, or even
silenced Plaatje’s intercommunications. In a critical reading of Du Bois’s
1925 essay, “The Negro Mind Reaches Out”, Chrisman draws attention to
his prejudices concerning the devastating economic situation and
proletarianisation, the nationalist revolutionary political action, and the
confrontational urbanised culture of black South Africa, which do not fit
with his own elitism, cosmopolitanism, Fabian gradualism and exotic
pastoralisation of Africa. Even more, she argues that Du Bois is disinclined
to ascribe a vanguard role to anyone who has not received validation by
white metropolitan institutions. Extending her conclusion that Du Bois’s
global articulations failed to reflect black South Africa, Chrisman prompts
us to consider Spivak’s objection to black Atlantic cosmopolitanism, asking
if it is indeed adequate to the conditions of Africans on the continent.
Ntongela Masilela elucidates Peter Abrahams’s role in the modern African
world. He explains why Abrahams is such a major figure in the New African
Movement and in modernity in South Africa and the wider black Atlantic.
As an African author who was instrumental in establishing English as the
dominant language, and who advanced the position of the naturalist/realist
novel in modern South African literature, Abrahams made a decisive

10
 Introduction

contribution to the transition from a philosophical to a literary engagement

with modernity in South African culture. As a Pan-Africanist, he nurtured
a cosmopolitanism that the later Gilroy would expand upon, and, as the
author of Return to Goli, he drew on this cosmopolitanism to offer a spirited
articulation of black modernity in popular culture and journalism in South
Africa. Returning to Abrahams’s Return to Goli, Masilela suggests, allows
contemporary readers to recuperate some of the potentials of modernity that
were blighted by apartheid and only started re-emerging in the early 1990s,
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i.e. around the time that Gilroy published The Black Atlantic: Modernity and
Double Consciousness.
Kgomotso Masimola focuses on Peter Abrahams’s and Es’kia Mphahlele’s
autobiographies Tell Freedom and Down Second Avenue respectively.
Masimola enriches Gilroy’s notion of the black Atlantic with Jann Assmann’s
account of cultural memory and Giles Deleuze’s remarks on repetition to
distinguish two modes of engagement with the black Atlantic. Abrahams, he
suggests, seeks to “belong to the Black Atlantic”, while Mphahlele seeks
to “become within it.” He illustrates this through an analysis of the different
ways in which Abrahams and Mphahlele depict nature and departure.
Masimola argues that Abrahams claims belonging to the black Atlantic
through his identification with the Harlem Renaissance and the repetition of
Countee Cullen’s Romantic poetics. Mphahlele, in turn, becomes within the
black Atlantic: in his autobiographical construction of himself he reimagines
and reterritorialises figures of black Atlantic cultural memory in the South
African context.
Collective memory making in contemporary memorialisation of Black
Atlantic slavery is the concern of Alan Rice’s article. Rice focuses on two
locales of memorialisation: the Wye plantation, where Frederick Douglass
was born and spent his early life; and Lancaster, where Sambo is buried and
a slave memorial has recently been unveiled. Pierre Nora’s distinction
between official History and memory informs Rice’s claim that the symbolic
annihilation affected by tours of sites of enslavement, such as plantations,
call for countering through dialogisation with Douglass’s autobiographical
writings. And the sentimentalising panegyrics of abolitionists demand
resistance by present-day rememory which acknowledges the agency of
African descendant subjects, as Dorothea Smartt does in a poem engaging
with Sambo’s legacy. Rice concludes that memorialisation is most effective
if it localises the routed existence of subjects, if monuments and texts
supplement each other, and if, in the words of artist Lubaina Himid, it allows

11
 Thomas Olver and Stephan Meyer

the people who engage with the memorials “to move on.”
Liese van der Watt’s article maps out the theoretical underpinnings of
different streams in contemporary whiteness studies. One such approach is
represented by Paul Gilroy’s recent work on postracial humanism, which
allows us “to move on” and exit whiteness. She concurs with Gilroy that, in
a racialised world, race cannot just be absented nor should it just be made
invisible. Rather, reaching the utopia of a raceless world requires changing
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the way we see. This is the point of an “adversarial aesthetics” (Seshadri-

Crooks) which throws racial signification into disarray gradually and on a
small scale. In this way we can move away from what Gilroy calls identity as
something to be “possessed and displayed” and which demands
identification and unanimism, to identity “as a noun of process” that calls
for communication and solidarity. Van der Watt takes Gilroy’s declaration
that the visual is overtaking the sound of music and words as the dominant
logic of communication as an invocation to investigate ways in which visual
artists like Berni Searle articulate how to “move us from identity politics to
identity activism”.
The special issue also includes two interviews. The first is with Lewis
Nkosi, who has lived and written on many Atlantic shores. With his
qualifications and parenthetical references to “the so-called ‘Black Atlantic’,”
Nkosi distances himself from the concept to a certain extent, thereby alerting
us to the essentialising dangers lurking in the term. While acknowledging
the near-synonymity of nomadism to the vocation of writing for some black
South Africans, he also questions the routes/roots dichotomy informing the
black Atlanticist/Afrocentric debate. And countering the North Atlanticism
of some black Atlanticists he remarks that, whereas “in the old days
cosmopolitanism was measured in terms of one’s visit to the metropolitan
centres of Europe and America”, it is currently South Africa which “enjoys
the privilege of being a genuine cosmopolitan centre to satisfy any so-called
citizen of the world”.
In the second interview, Thomas Olver and Stephan Meyer ask Zoë
Wicomb to explore issues related to her novel David’s Story. Wicomb goes
into her views on the ethics of violence, in particular the squeamishness of
those who believe that their hands are clean. She elaborates on the role of
the novel in social transformation and the changing function of historical
fiction in South Africa. Finally, she questions the practice of collaborative
auto/biography between unequals because it replicates unequal power
relations. The publicity that oral narrators receive, she states “is not the

12
 Introduction

same as being given subjectivity … subjectivity can’t be conferred; it can

only be posited by the self”.
In conclusion, a word of thanks to all the contributors, who have made
this special issue possible, and to the editorial board of Current Writing. The
journal continues to position itself at the forefront of literary and cultural
debate in southern Africa, and we are grateful for the support and
encouragement we have received in this project.
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Notes
1. See also the “Statement and plan of action of the South Africa – African Union
– Caribbean Diaspora Conference” which includes formulations such as: “The
objective of the Conference was to celebrate the centuries-old historical and
cultural bonds and re-affirm the spiritual affinity between Africa and the
Diaspora based on a common history and shared experiences; create linkages
between Africa and the Diaspora; establish mechanisms for building stronger
political and economic relations between Africa and the Caribbean; acknowledge
the significant contribution of the Caribbean to the Pan-African tradition; and
develop an agenda for confronting common challenges in order to support the
implementation of the African Union decisions on the African Diaspora.” http:/
/www.africa-union.org/News_Events/Calendar_of_%20Events/Jamaica/
Decision.htm
2. For Soga and others, see Attwell (2005); for Seme see Rive and Couzens (1991).
For New Africans, see Masilela http://pzadmin.pitzer.edu/masilela; for Du Bois
and Plaatje, see Chrisman (2002 and 2005); for performers, see McCord (1995);
Lindfors (1999) and Shephard (2003). For music and cinema, see Nixon (1994)
and Titlestad (2004 and 2005). For Maxeke, see Masilela (2003). For Mandela
in the global culture industry, see Tomaselli and Boster (2002). For Fanon, see
Pithouse (2003). For Gates and West, see Mangcu (14 July 2005 and 21 July
2005). For South Africa in the black self-imaginary, see Magubane (1987) and
Ngugi wa Thiong’o (2003) and in the global imaginary, see De Kock (2001).
3. Simon Gikandi edited a special issue for Research in African Literatures on “The
Black Atlantic” Winter 1996, 27(4). Modern Fiction Studies has a special issue
forthcoming on “Paris, Modern Fiction, and the Black Atlantic”; the International
Journal of Francophone Studies has announced a special issue “Oceanic
Dialogues: From the Black Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific”. Cassell and Continuum
have a Black Atlantic book series, which includes titles by Pettinger (1998),
Walvin (2000) and Rice (2003). See also Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould (eds)
(2001). Reviews of these and other authoritative publications can be found in
Carretta (2000) and Elmer (2005). The Rutgers Center for Historical Research
has been running a high-profile programme on the Black Atlantic since 1997. And
the MLA will be hosting a session on “Black Enlightenment-Black Atlantic” at
its annual meeting in 2005.

13
 Thomas Olver and Stephan Meyer

4. See Hendricks 2002; Raman 2003; Asmal 2004.

5. See for example Masilela’s response to Gilroy (1996) and Asante (2000), and
Magubane and Zeleza’s (2001) responses to Gates’s Wonders of the African
World.

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