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 “Maboula’s writing is a resolute respiration which, line after line, exposes and challenges the suffocating violence of racism à la française. This is an intimate text that will change how you look at race and blackness.”
Mame-Fatou Niang, author of Identités françaises Maboula Soumahoro is an associate professor at the University of Tours and president of the Black History Month Association, dedicated to celebrating Black history and cultures.