Valkeakari

Precarious Passages unites literature written by
members of the far-flung Black Anglophone diaspora. Rather than categorizing
novels as simply ＂African American,＂ ＂Black Canadian,＂
＂Black British,＂ or ＂postcolonial African Caribbean,＂ this
book takes an integrative approach: it argues that fiction creates and sustains
a sense of a wider African diasporic community in the Western world.

Tuire Valkeakari analyzes the writing of Toni Morrison, Caryl
Phillips, Lawrence Hill, and other contemporary novelists of African descent.
She shows how their novels connect with each other and with defining moments in
the transatlantic experience, most notably the Middle Passage and enslavement.
The lives of their characters are marked by migration and displacement. Their
protagonists yearn to experience fulfilling human connection in a place they
can call home. Portraying strategies of survival, adaptation, and resistance
across the limitless varieties of life experiences in the diaspora, these
novelists continually reimagine what it means to share a Black diasporic
identity.

Tuire Valkeakari is professor of English at Providence College and the author of Religious Idiom and the African American Novel, 1952-1998.