Afrodiasporic Forms: Slavery in Literature and Culture of the African Diaspora by Raquel Kennon (review)

In Afrodiasporic Forms: Slavery in Literature and Culture of the African Diaspora, Raquel Kennon offers a careful and compelling analysis of what she calls a “poetic monde noir” (3). In close readings of a diverse range of texts (poetry, novels, theater, visual art, and music) from well-established and lesser-known writers and artists, Kennon revisits the memory of chattel slavery as experienced and lodged in three locations in the Americas— Brazil, Cuba and the US. The book’s impressive trajectory covers three centuries, engaging texts as varied as Juan Francisco Manzano’s Autobiografía de un esclavo (1839) written in Cuba (the only known slave narrative from a Spanish American colony), and Kara Walker’s massive 2014 project, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, installed in the old Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn, New York. Kennon’s beautifully written and comprehensive examination of a Black diasporic imagination enables her to methodically unearth and reconnect the arch of transatlantic slavery, linking the historical memories of Africa, Europe and the Americas. In the process, she produces a world of Black ideas and creation across Portuguese, Spanish, British, and British American manifestations of enslavement’s ongoing legacies. Defying a neat chronological or geographical structure (moving from Brazil to the US and then back to Brazil and finally Cuba), Kennon’s study interweaves comparative analysis of Black people’s experiences in diaspora with meditations on art and art making, moving across spatial and temporal boundaries to narrate an errant Black world poetics.