Voicing Memory and History: Diaspora Consciousness in Contemporary Fiction by New World African Writers

Based on the hypothesis that the (re)creation of epistemic home places in African diaspora fiction is achieved through an apprapriation of historical, mental, bodily, and discursive space - the appropriation of signs, by means of which a closed, fixed and distorted history, identity, and imagination is opened up and set in motion once more - this essay traces discursive strategies of resistance to probe different meanings the concept of home has taken on in selected novels by New World African writers from Canada, the United States, the Caribbean, and Brazil. In the process, it focuses on the (re)creation of home out of errantry, the rewriting of history through memory, by prablematizing memory as a site of identity (re)construction, ethical struggle over the access to signification, and epistemic (re)vision. --- Original in English