Black is the Journey, Africana the Name

In this highly original book, Maboula Soumahoro explores the cultural and political vastness of the Black Atlantic, where Africa, Europe, and the Americas were tied together by the brutal realities of the slave trade and colonialism. Each of these spaces has its own way of reading the Black body and the Black experience, and its own modes of visibility, invisibility, silence, and amplification of Black life. By weaving together her personal history with that of France and its abiding myth of color-blindness, Maboula Soumahoro highlights the banality and persistence of structural racism in France today, and shows that freedom will be found in the journey and movement between the sites of the Atlantic triangle. Africana is the name of that freedom. How can we build and reflect on a collective diasporic identity through a personal journey? What are the limits and possibilities of this endeavor, when the personal journey is that of oft-erased bodies and stories, de-humanized lives, and when Black populations in Africa, the Americas, and Europe identify and misidentify with each other, their sensibilities shaped by the particular locales in which their lives unfold? This book makes an important intellectual contribution to contemporary public conversations and theoretical inquiry into race, racism, blackness, and identity today, as it probes and questions the academic methodologies that have functioned as structures of exclusion.

Acknowledgements Translator’s Note Foreword – Saidiya Hartman Introduction. Black speech / Speaking blackness       On diaspora       What is this “I”? The Triangle       Chronotope       Scholarly and personal implications       An intellectual tradition       The question of return University Trajectory       Black orbit       Studying in France       Studying overseas The Hexagon       “For the great MCs, on behalf of a grateful ‘hood’”       2005: “Right the wrong, by any means necessary”       Public discourse       Black History Month (BHM) / Africana Days       To be done with the burden of race Conclusion. The Orbs are Black, or, what beauty owes to chaos Notes