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ABSTRACT
Building on Africanist and third wave feminist critiques of Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, this essay examines how the notion of diaspora is interpreted by non-anglophone women writers of African descent. In particular, it focuses on the work and careers of two women authors: Afro-Brazilian novelist and academic Conceição Evaristo and Mozambican fiction writer and essayist Paulina Chiziane. Both of these authors participate in international events about the black diaspora and their work has been widely translated. Despite playing active roles in transnational academic and literary communities, however, these two authors repeatedly focus on national concerns in their fiction. The essay argues that many black women writers privilege domestic spaces, such as home and nation, over the space of the black diaspora. Finally, the essay uses reflections on Evaristo's and Chiziane's work to revise Toni Morrison's role in Gilroy's black Atlantic, starting with her most recent novel, Home.
"The war is over, but at home the battle wages on."
-Paulina Chiziane1
Among the intellectuals who are most central to Paul Gilroy's theory of the black Atlantic, Toni Morrison stands out. It is not because she is a woman- though that detail remains significant. Rather, Morrison has the distinction of being the only writer whom Gilroy does not value for her travels. Certainly, the work of this Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author has done its fair share of moving. Her novels are internationally read and widely translated and many of her characters follow and are followed by their own, haunted routes. Moreover, Morrison herself has done a great deal of travelling in her capacity as a public figure. Yet even though she has moved around like Marcus Garvey, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Richard Wright, somehow it is her work rather than her "[life] that fit[s] readily into the pattern of movement, transformation, and relocation" spelled out in The Black Atlantic (Gilroy xi).
Given Gilroy's repeated insistence on the significance of scholars' physical movement to the foundations of the black Atlantic, the elision of Morrison as a traveler becomes especially suspicious. If "the powerful effects of even tempo- rary experiences of exile, relocation, and displacement" matter so much for an understanding of "the direction and character of black culture and art"...