Phillis Wheatley is a towering figure of African American literature whose work is usually included in most anthologies of American literature. However, most black studies scholarship often reduces Wheatley’s impact on African American literature by representing her as mainly a “neoclassical” author whose beliefs about race were accommodationist and did not reflect the realities of most African Americans of her generation. Yet if we draw from the canonical works of Henry Louis Gates, Vincent Carretta, John C. Shields, Cassandra L. Smith, April C. Langley, and David Waldstreicher, we can see how Wheatley’s rhetorical strategies similar to those of the eighteenth-century Senegambian griots and griottes and were central to her racial and cultural affiliations and resistances. At the turn of the twentieth century, Pauline Hopkins and W. E. B. Du Bois mobilized and challenged restrictive notions of genealogical forms, the very epistemological terrain that was employed to argue for white racial supremacy, as they penned their own responses to progressive utopian literature that flourished in the American Gilded Age, which was often, although not always, based upon racist and xenophobic principles. Their novels were, like the utopian literature of the prior decades, concerned with the dialectic between romance and realism, the possible and the actual, and thus, laid a framework for future Afrofuturist literature in the century to come.

After these precursors, writers of the African diaspora also delve deeply into themes of kinship and genealogy with respect to identity and nationhood. The politically fraught and ambivalent metaphor of the queer, national family structures Andrew Salkey’s Windrush novel, Escape to an Autumn Pavement (1960) vision of diasporic belonging. Undermining the established ideal of heterosexual family-as-nation (Gilroy, The Black Atlantic), Salkey refigures national inclusion via kinship with queer masculinity, instead of being premised on masculinist national solidarity, revealing the former’s political contradictions as it gestures towards a homonationalist (Puar, Terrorist Assemblages) regime. Likewise, since the twentieth century, African American (women) writers, namely Gayl Jones, Octavia Butler, and Toni Morrison, have been recognized for portraying family and kinship as modes of relation haunted by transatlantic slavery and colonialism. Far from a typical poster-child for feminism and anti-slavery, Lilith, the protagonist of The Book of the Night Women, opts for strategic employment of kinship for self-pleasure and self-fulfillment, rather than for communal revolution, illustrates the limits to “kinships of resistance.”

Each presenter will be allotted 15 minutes to present. The presentations will be followed by a 15-minutes of unstructured discussion.

This connective panel considers how “family resemblances”—kinships, diasporic relations, alliances, familial spaces, relational ways of thinking—are articulated in African, African American, and Caribbean languages, literatures, and cultures.

In “Race, Senegambian Culture, and Griot Rhetorical Strategies in Selected Poems and Letters of Phillis Wheatley” Babacar M’Baye will examine how rhetorical strategies similar to those of the eighteenth-century Senegambian griots and griottes were central to Phillis Wheatley’s racial and cultural affiliations and resistances.

In “Love the Man, Love the Nation: Queer Kinship and Diasporic Belonging in Andrew Salkey’s Escape to an Autumn Pavement Anwesha Kundu will examine Andrew Salkey’s Windrush novel, Escape to an Autumn Pavement (1960), and the politically fraught and ambivalent metaphor of the queer, national family structures the text’s vision of diasporic belonging.

In “Black Women, Messy Kinships, and Literary-Historical Kindred in Marlon James’ The Book of Night Women,” Arselyne Chery will examine Marlon James’ The Book of Night Women as a case study, arguing that James radicalizes Black female subjectivity in order to trouble romantic, normative, and at times unsafe constructions of family and kinship under histories of oppression and resistance.

In “Clandestine Romantic Kinship in Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood and W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess,” Harry Hall will examine the productive link between Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1902-3) and W. E. B Du Bois’s Dark Princess (1928) and how both employ the trope of international family resemblances and diasporic kinship relations to imagine alternative and romance-inflected narratives contrasting their realist context during the nadir of American race relations.

The panelists in this proposed session represent a diversity of voices in career level (from PhD Candidate to Professor), a range of institution types (liberal arts, public university, and private university), and they represent a range of ethnic, gender, and social backgrounds.