Where Is the Love? Race, Self-Exile, and a Kind of Reconciliation

Abstract

Cultivating solidarity or love for community for those systematically abused by the state and its civic community is a longstanding challenge. While the latter should primarily shoulder responsibility for (re)building trust, this article focuses on the abused self-exile’s agency and possible reasons for return. To understand possible motivations for (re)engagement, this article explores the African American expatriate experience rendered in fi ction and criticism. It focuses specifi cally on William Gardner Smith’s The Stone Face and its portrait of the potentialities of Black love as a vehicle of social resurrection and the exercise of political power.