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.
