Precarious Passages

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.