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Peter Abrahams in the modern African world

2004; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 16; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1013929x.2004.9678193

2159-9130

Ntongela Masilela,

Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

The article advances and refines Paul Gilroy's oft‐ignored characterisation of the Black Atlantic as an 'assemblage' in order to return to its Deleuzean provenance whereby an assemblage expresses a flux of becoming rather than a static belonging. In the autobiographies of Peter Abrahams and Es'kia Mphahlele becoming is evidenced by a sophisticated memoric repetition of Afro‐American figures of memory, involving as they do lines of flight and, in the light of anticipated nomadic routes out of South Africa, an emerging intersubjectivity that goes beyond an imitative belonging to the Black Atlantic. Such a repetition, what Deleuze calls the third repetition, in cultural memory attests to a positively transculturative tension.