Prophetic Remembrance: Black Subjectivity in African American and South African Trauma Narratives

By Erica Still

Using the term "prophetic remembrance" to articulate the expression of a constituent faith in the performative capacity of language, Erica Still shows how black subjectivity is born of and interprets cultural trauma. She brings together African American neo-slave narratives and Black South African postapartheid narratives to reveal the processes by which black subjectivity accounts for its traumatic origins, names the therapeutic work of the present, and inscribes the possibility of the future.

The author draws on trauma studies, black theology, and literary criticism as she considers how writers such as Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, John Edgar Wideman, David Bradley, Sindiwe Magona, K. Sello Duiker, and Zakes Mda explore the possibilities for rehearsing a traumatic past without being overcome by it. Although both African American and South African literary studies have addressed questions of memory, narrative, and trauma, little comparative work has been done. Prophetic Remembrance offers this comparative focus in reading these literatures together to address the question of what it means to remember and to recover from racial oppression.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Dec 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9780813936574

Book preview

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Prophetic Remembrance

Erica Still

Prophetic Remembrance

Black Subjectivity in

African American

and South African

Trauma Narratives

University of Virginia Press Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2014 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2014

9    8    7    6    5    4    3    2    1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Still, Erica, 1977–

    Prophetic remembrance : black subjectivity in African American and South African trauma narratives / Erica Still.

        pages    cm

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN

978-0-8139-3655-0 (cloth : alk. paper) —

ISBN

978-0-8139-3656-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) —

ISBN

978-0-8139-3657-4 (e-book)

    1. American fiction—African American authors—History and criticism. 2. American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 3. American fiction—21st century—History and criticism. 4. South African fiction (English)—20th century—History and criticism. 5. South African fiction (English)—21st century—History and criticism. 6. Racism in literature. 7. Collective memory in literature. 8. Psychic trauma in literature. 9. African Americans in literature. 10. Blacks in literature. I. Title.

    PS

374.

R

32

S

86  2014

    813.009'355—dc23

2014007954

contents

acknowledgments

Introduction: Toward a Theory

of Prophetic Remembrance

chapter one

Ruptured Wounds: The Body

of Prophetic Remembrance

chapter two

Fugitive Homes: The Space

of Prophetic Remembrance

chapter three

Artful Mourning: The Language

of Prophetic Remembrance

chapter four

Resurrection Scars: The Time

of Prophetic Remembrance

Conclusion: Prophetic Remembrance—Race, Religion, and the Literary

notes

bibliography

index

acknowledgments

It is a pleasure to think about those who helped to bring this project to fruition, and I am eager to thank them publicly. Support from the Wake Forest University Archie Fund for the Arts and Humanities made it possible to travel to South Africa, and the staff at the National English Literary Museum (NELM) in Grahamstown were generous in their time and assistance. This project came into being because of the 2001 International Forum for U.S. Studies (IFUSS) research trip to South Africa, and so to Kristin Solli, Jane Desmond, and Virginia Dominguez I am truly indebted. Cathie Brettschneider at the University of Virginia Press saw promise in this project and stuck with it through multiple revisions. I deeply appreciate her vision and belief in these ideas. Likewise, the generous readers for the press provided insightful feedback, and the book is definitely better for their influence. Ellen Satrom’s enthusiasm and professionalism provided welcome reassurance, and Carol Sickman-Garner’s attention to detail was greatly appreciated.

A host of readers in the early stages of my work enriched my thinking, and I remain especially grateful for those initial responses and conversations with Sandra Barkan, Harry Stecopoulos, and Horace Porter. Tom Lutz and Lori Peterson Branch were early and important believers in the project, and even now their encouragement remains dear to me. More recently, colleagues at Wake Forest University have helped me to sharpen my ideas: Dean Franco, Jeff Holdridge, Gillian Overing, and Eric Wilson read and responded to my work at critical junctures. Jim Hans deserves a special note of thanks for his engagement with my ideas and his unwavering support of me. Likewise, Anne Boyle has been a most welcome mentor from the beginning of my career, and I am fortunate to count her as a friend and colleague. Mary DeShazer continues to be an invaluable mentor, advocate, and reader; what I have learned from her makes me a better scholar and person. Claudia Kairoff, Gale Sigal, and Olga Valbuena have also been great sources of encouragement, along with Laura Aull, Holly Brower, Simone Caron, Rachael Deagman, Omaar Hena, Jeff Lerner, and Eric Stottlemeyer. Rian Bowie, Tanisha Ramachandran, and Elisabeth Whitehead have been treasured friends and colleagues—their presence has helped make Winston-Salem feel more like home.

A broad community of friends and supporters has blessed my life throughout the long process of writing this book: Peggy Barrett, Bridgette Blackwell, Ann Dixon-Coppage, Stacy Erickson, Trina Goacher, Tiffany Grant, Kevin and Maria Kummer, Sarah MacDonald, James and Rhon Manigault-Bryant, Howard and Kristen Montgomery, Brooks Nihart, Ruth Ost, Holly Serrett, Horace Sheppard Jr., Carole Smallwood, Gloria Smallwood, Toni Smallwood, Jennifer Smallwood-Taylor, Jessica Still, Norman and Michelle Still, Keith Wilhite—all have expressed interest, offered support, asked critical questions, and generally kept me going. You’ve made a world of difference in my life, and I’m humbled by your care for me. I hope you know how much you mean to me. Bill Still Jr., Pearl Still, Bill Still III, and Roslyn Still have been with me every step of the way, and I could not ask for a better family. I love you deeply; thanks for keeping—and sharing—the faith. Iris Still gets her own sentence, and she knows why.

Prophetic Remembrance

Introduction

Toward a Theory of

Prophetic Remembrance

African-American Settlers Flock to South Africa—thus proclaimed an article in the July 1994 issue of Crisis magazine, which went on to report the growing trend of immigration from the United States to the newly democratized South Africa. Still a relatively small group, these African American immigrants imagined themselves experiencing a chance to participate in South Africa’s renewal—a chance predicated on giving . . . and receiving (Crisis 18). After decades of anti-apartheid protest, African American interest in South Africa manifested itself in the journey home, as some called it (Crisis 47). Further evidence of this diasporic connection arrived in August 1994, when the entire issue of Ebony magazine focused on the new South Africa. From politics to culture, the magazine’s readers were reintroduced to the country that for so long had represented the bastion of white supremacy. Given the long history of African American interest in South Africa (such as the collaboration between the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NAACP] and the budding African National Congress [ANC] in 1917 and the anti-apartheid activism of the 1970s and 1980s), the magazine’s focus comes as no surprise. South Africa exists in the cultural imagination of many African Americans as the final site of overt racial injustice and triumphant black struggle. Likewise, many Black South Africans recognize the US civil rights struggle as a precursor and complementary effort to their own striving for racial equality and justice. For example, on his visit to Harlem in June 1990, Nelson Mandela proclaimed, The kinship that the ANC feels for the people of Harlem goes deeper than skin color. It is the kinship of our shared historical experiences and the kinship of the solidarity of the victims of blind prejudice and hatred. To our people, Harlem symbolizes the strength and beauty in resistance, and you have taught us that out of resistance to injustice comes renaissance, renewal, and rebirth (Ebony 29). While Mandela’s remarks call to mind the artistic production of the Harlem Renaissance and the ensuing reputation the area enjoys, they also suggest an affiliation with African Americans more broadly based on shared historical experiences (Ebony 29).

Those historical experiences of racial discrimination are at the heart of a more recent text, Zakes Mda’s 2007 novel Cion. Mda imaginatively extends these cross-cultural connections as he brings his Black South African protagonist, Toloki, to a small town outside Athens, Ohio. According to Toloki (also the narrator of Mda’s earlier novel Ways of Dying), he is in the United States to study additional mourning rituals, as he has exhausted the grieving practices of his native South Africa. Significantly, Mda sets his narrator in the midst of a race-conscious, racially mixed community, where he soon encounters a history of slavery and discrimination. Interwoven throughout Toloki’s account of his year in Ohio is the story of two slave brothers who escape from a Virginia plantation in the nineteenth century. Their descendants, Toloki’s host family (the Quigleys), struggle to keep their story and traditions alive in the face of a world increasingly uninterested in them. I want to suggest that it is no coincidence that Toloki, a professional mourner, experiences the United States as a site of conflict about how best to remember a history of racialized oppression. Given South Africa’s own recent past, Mda’s attention to these questions of history and collective trauma is perhaps to be expected. But why, we might ask, pose these questions in the US context? In other words, what about American slavery is useful for a Black South African protagonist to explore? What purpose does it serve him? As Toloki himself remarks, There may just as well be an injustice here; but who am I to right American wrongs? I have left quite a few where I come from (Cion 17). Thinking cross-culturally, we might also ask: What does a South African perspective add to US understandings of its own racial history? Through this South African literary reconstruction of American slavery, Mda invites readers to consider what might be gained by thinking simultaneously about the legacies of slavery and apartheid.

Prophetic Remembrance undertakes a similar project by reading contemporary neo-slave and post-apartheid narratives together. Rather than a comparative study of the workings of racial oppression and corresponding resistance, however, this project argues for and seeks to unpack a shared impulse to wrestle with the weight of the past evident in African American and Black South African fiction. I would contend that it is not specifically a similarity between slavery and apartheid that Mda intends to invoke, but rather a similarity of burden shared by twentieth- and twenty-first-century African Americans and Black South Africans. Specifically, both populations must negotiate a history of oppression without either denying or dwelling in it. Cion raises a question crucial in both the US and the South African contexts: How best to remember the traumatic past? This shared burden, though necessarily different in the particulars, serves as the basis for the cross-cultural connections represented in Mda’s novel. Likewise, it is the foundation for the comparative focus of this project.

Cion raises compelling questions about the relationship between mourning a traumatic past and upholding meaningful traditions that might lead to a desirable future. Toloki is a professional mourner, his work precisely to recognize and grieve for loss, and because he brings that work to the Kilvert community he is able to help its citizens come to terms with the troubled and troubling past that they have inherited. He brings a nuanced approach to memory and tradition, suggesting that both must be alive and fluid if they are to be life giving. As he remarks, After all, memory is what you make of it. . . . We all construct our past as we go along (272). Memory is meant to be usable in the present, Mda suggests, and it must be actively constructed and engaged in order for it to speak meaningfully to contemporary concerns. Consequently, Toloki both appreciates and revises Ruth’s approach to tradition, which is constant literal repetition, just as he both affirms and repurposes Mahlon’s reenactments of stories about slaves attempting escape. Through the failures of his American hosts and the positive effects he has experienced because of his own mourning practices, Toloki learns and then teaches his friends (and potentially, readers) how to bear the burden of the past without forfeiting the possibilities of the future.

Other readers of Cion have also remarked on Mda’s meditation on methods for dealing with traumatic pasts. A brief overview of their questions and conclusions further illustrates the contributions of Mda’s novel, along with introducing some of the key concerns of this present study. For example, in their separate articles, Yogita Goyal and Seretha Williams both argue that through his protagonist Mda achieves a revision of conventional mourning and/or memorialization practices in literary narratives about slavery. Rather than a commitment to unearthing forgotten histories as such, Mda demonstrates the possibilities available through creative reimaginings of the past that involve play and invention. In Goyal’s reading, Toloki . . . suggests that any possible redemption will come neither from the recovery of repressed memories nor through forgetting, but by creatively reimagining the loss into a resource for a livable future (152). Ultimately, she contends, Mda asserts that an aesthetic response to the traumatic past is the only way forward, for it is the ability of art to congeal memory in unexpected ways—not in objects but in performances that bind the community together—that offers a solution to the bind of amnesia or entrapment within the past (Goyal 165). In a similar move, Williams too concludes that the creativity embodied in Toloki is Mda’s solution to the problem of memory. She posits that Mda makes an important intervention as he liberates the neoslave narrative from its audience’s expectation that it document facts and provide evidence of its authenticity (8). Through this liberating act, Mda proposes that creative expression, not rote memorization and retellings, will facilitate the healing of physical, spiritual, and psychological traumas that continue to haunt Americans well into the twenty-first century (Williams 8). For both scholars, then, Mda’s emphasis on a creative, aesthetic retelling of the traumatic past moves the neo-slave narrative beyond its documentary function.

It is worth noting, however, that while Goyal and Williams agree on the importance of a creative reimagining of a traumatic past, they differ on the possible outcomes of such a project. For Goyal, the lesson of Cion is a cautionary one; rather than an outright celebration of literary mourning, she suggests, Cion reveals the dangers of turning to the past in search of healing: Mda highlights the haunting presence of the violent past of apartheid and slavery in the present, and suggests that in mourning the past, memory might lead in unexpected, uncomfortable directions, rather than restoring a whole identity or healing the scars of the past (149). Williams offers almost the exact opposite vision of Mda’s achievement, arguing that "Toloki, as such, brings from South Africa to America that language of healing and forgiveness and helps the Quigley family, in particular, and the United States, in general, to embark upon their own truthful mourning. Toloki’s function in Cion, ultimately, is to inspire these characters to mourn properly so that they can finally move forward and be free (11). Whereas Goyal reads Mda as seeking new forms of politics that are equal to the task of imagining the possibilities of contemporary life [and offering] a rich counterpoint to influential theorizations of memory, mourning, and temporality in discussions of contemporary fiction about slavery and apartheid" (149), Williams interprets Mda’s novel as providing precisely the kind of redemptive memory that allows for healing and restoration of the national community. This difference is telling, for it speaks to the critical debate about the role of literary accounts of the troublesome past; can such work actually accomplish racial or cultural healing for individuals or collectives? The proliferation and success of narratives about slavery and apartheid suggest that writers and readers are grappling with these issues and, as Goyal and Williams exemplify, reaching very different conclusions.

Kerry Bystrom’s reading of Cion offers yet another perspective, as she considers its transnational aspects (though she too attends to questions of memory, race, and mourning). Bystrom seems primarily concerned with the translatability of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) model into the US context, suggesting that while the novel fundamentally re-affirms the rhetoric of forgiveness and reconciliation and points to the positive role that mourning can play in rebuilding the lives of individuals as well as communities in very different locales, it also serves as a valuable and constructive criticism of elite-imposed models of transitional justice (415). Whereas the TRC relied upon a rhetoric of pity for audience sympathy and investment, Mda offers cathartic laughter. He depends on humor in an effort to cultivate an emotion that produces political solidarity rather than pity, suggesting that the usefulness of dealing with traumatic histories rests in the applicability of lessons learned to fighting ongoing systems of oppression (Bystrom 413). Troubling pasts must be reckoned with in order to gain insight into the nature of the structures of thought that perpetuate systems of oppression worldwide (Bystrom 415). Mda, through Toloki, offers an alternative means of building a coalition that might respond to local and international needs: By sidestepping the demand to produce narratives of victimization in order to produce pity, Toloki may open more flexible and perhaps locally responsive spaces and forms of articulating memory (Bystrom 406). In this regard, Bystrom too affirms the playful, creative approach toward difficult histories, even as she extends the discussion to contemporary practices of reckoning with human rights abuses and transnational appropriations.

Taken together, these three readings of this neo-slave narrative recounted by a South African professional mourner highlight the issues with which Prophetic Remembrance is concerned. At the core of this study lies this question: What cultural work do contemporary literary narratives about slavery and apartheid perform in creating and sustaining a black diasporic imagination? Using Cion and its critical reception as a point of departure, I set out to articulate the nature of literary engagements with racialized historical trauma. Bystrom, Goyal, and Williams are helpful in mapping out a range of issues texts like Cion raise: the contours of the relationship between literature and memory, the role of memory in cultural identity, the struggle between remembering and forgetting the past in an effort to embrace the future, and the possibilities for transnational affiliation across or around similar cultural experiences, to name a few.

In their varied ways, these critical readings rightfully suggest that Mda’s novel calls for a more creative and innovative approach to reckoning with the past’s influence on contemporary circumstances. I would add, however, that Cion itself resists easy prescriptions for what such a revised approach might actually accomplish. In other words, while Mda endorses a view of tradition as fluid and adaptive, it is less clear what such a view achieves for and demands of his characters (and readers). Does it require a move away from focusing on the past as a source of healing, as Goyal contends, or does it demand embracing the past in order to facilitate such healing, as Williams would have it? Both arguments find support in the text, indicating a degree of ambiguity—or perhaps more precisely, ambivalence—about the outcome of this reconceived idea of tradition. Likewise, Bystrom has to acknowledge that the novel seems both to question and to endorse transnationalism, suggesting once again that the text is of two minds about the positions to which it lays claim. I read this ambivalence not as a flaw of the novel, but as an important indication of a broader statement about the connection of memory, cultural identity, and literature. Specifically, Cion and the other texts under consideration here reveal a paradox fundamental to contemporary narratives about slavery and apartheid. This paradox, which I call prophetic remembrance, takes us beyond either/or solutions to the problem of the past’s relation to the future, compelling us instead to wrestle with both/and possibilities.

Prophetic Remembrance finds its origins in two distinct cultural phenomena. First, the explosion of civil rights, Black Power, and cultural studies between 1950 and 1980 led to a proliferation of academic accounts of slavery and black life in the United States. In response to much of this more widely available historical record, between 1969 and 2009 African Americans authored numerous fictional accounts of slavery, several to critical acclaim. Second, from 1995 to 2003 South Africa’s highly publicized Truth and Reconciliation Commission conducted an expansive investigation of the country’s recent apartheid past, and a body of post-apartheid literature has grown alongside, out of, and against that official historical record. Different in form, scope, and political agenda, these events nevertheless reflect a common effort to reckon with the traumatic national histories of the United States and South Africa.

The cultural and historic connections between South Africa and the United States have been documented from Robert Kennedy’s 1966 address at the University of Cape Town, to George Fredrickson’s seminal texts White Supremacy (1981) and Black Liberation (1996), to Rob Nixon’s essential study Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood (1994), and to Alison Bernstein and Jacklyn Cock’s Melting Pots and Rainbow Nations (2002). Less attention, however, has been focused solely on connections between African American and Black South African fiction. Prophetic Remembrance attempts to begin filling this void as it reads African American and Black South African narratives of trauma together in order to understand the ways in which harrowing memory is negotiated by a black subjectivity struggling to write itself into a reclaimed future. Focusing primarily on accounts of slavery and apartheid written in the last twenty-five years, I argue that prophetic remembrance names the work and/or method by which a black subjectivity negotiates the competing demands of the past to be remembered and of the future to be restored as a site of possibility. The eight texts I examine—Beloved (Toni Morrison, 1987), Mother to Mother (Sindiwe Magona, 1999), Middle Passage (Charles Johnson, 1990), The Quiet Violence of Dreams (K. Sello Duiker, 2001), The Chaneysville Incident (David Bradley, 1981), Ways of Dying (Zakes Mda, 1995), The Cattle Killing (John Edgar Wideman, 1996), and The Heart of Redness (Zakes Mda, 2000)—both embody this method and explore the consequently available modes of reinterpreting a way of being in the world for black subjectivity. Each novel reveals a black subjectivity that accepts itself as born of traumatic circumstances and therefore necessarily bound to mourn its origins even as it lays claim to the promise of a future not necessarily marked by ongoing suffering. This black subjectivity is obligated to the simultaneous demands of the past and the future—the former seeking always to be remembered, even at the expense of the present; the latter calling out for innovation and creative grasping of endless possibilities. Emerging as a literary, ethical position from which black subjectivity responds to these competing claims, prophetic remembrance inhabits the present by looking backward and forward at once. It is about dealing with time, insisting that black subjectivity remember its traumatic origins, mourn the consequently scarred future, and choose faith over despair regarding that future.

The Perils and Promises of Comparison

Of course, it is easy and necessary to recognize the real distinctions between African American and Black South African experiences of racialized trauma. Slavery and apartheid are not the same experiences, and my consideration of narratives about them together should not suggest otherwise. Despite a shared basis in racialized thinking and horrifically enacted practices, slavery and Jim Crow segregation as political structures are different from colonialism and apartheid. While the US slave system depended upon transplanted Africans (and their descendants) primarily from the western and central regions of the continent, South African slavery largely involved peoples from the Indian Ocean slave trade—including the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, Mozambique, and Madagascar (although some slaves were from the northern parts of Africa). African Americans remain a minority of the US population, whereas Black South Africans are the majority and currently hold many of the official governing positions of the country (which is not to say that most Black South Africans do not continue to suffer from significant poverty and other social and political inequities). Race is a fluid signifier and does not mean the same thing in all contexts in the two countries—the example of Coloured and colored being the most obvious of several such differences. These distinctions often have lived implications that must also be recognized. On what grounds might neo-slave and post-apartheid narratives be read together, then?

Any comparative project takes on several risks, risks that should be carefully acknowledged. Rita Barnard offers five important suggestions for the potential comparatist of US and South African literatures, ranging from avoiding overly selective sampling that may lead one to exaggerate similarities or dissimilarities, to attend[ing] carefully to the different ways in which that fluid concept ‘race’ has been mobilized and molded in the course of two very different national histories, and finally to admonishing the would-be comparatist [to] be frank about the hopes, hurts, and desires that animate his or her project (Riots 403–4). As Barnard indicates, comparative projects have the potential to overstate similarities and differences, such that the comparison leads to faulty conclusions. Likewise, such projects can lose sight of important structural influences specific to each of the objects of study and thereby miss the sources of what might otherwise seem to be superficial differences. Finally, comparisons carry the potential for cultural imperialism, in which one of the objects becomes subsumed by the other and is approached as being derivative rather than autonomous and complex.

Despite these difficulties, I see several possibilities for reading these literatures together and for the comparative project in general. First, when based on actual points of convergence, such projects can serve as the foundation for strategic alliances, whether for resisting oppression, pooling resources, and so on. Second, just as they might overlook them, these projects might help reveal underlying structural influences. Such systemic factors could then be interrogated more thoroughly. Third, rather than instances of cultural imperialism, comparative projects offer the possibility of fostering cross-cultural reciprocity that challenges hierarchal or assimilationist approaches. Keeping these ideas in mind, then, I have tried here to avoid the perils and facilitate the possibilities of comparison. In the specific case of African American and Black South African literature, I would suggest, such a focus allows us to recognize a resonance of tone between the voices of racially oppressed groups, a resonance that opens further possibilities for strategic alliances across and beyond national borders.

Rather than reading bodies of literature against one another in order to identify similarities and differences, this project seeks to allow for a degree of synergism, insofar as it sets out to read these texts as speaking together. That is to say, my effort is to hear what these texts might say if approached as speaking in concert rather than in competition with each other (which should not indicate that they are univocal). I am approaching these literatures as if they are complementary efforts in one larger undertaking, rather than as if they are two distinct projects happening to share some characteristics (though of course they are that too). That undertaking focuses on a similarity of experience between twentieth- and twenty-first-century African Americans and Black South Africans. That experience is not slavery or apartheid—or even Jim Crow segregation and apartheid, which might be a more intuitive comparison. The similarity has to do with legacy: both African Americans and Black South Africans have inherited a traumatic past with which they must reckon in the midst of challenging present conditions. Despite their engagement with different systems of racialized oppression, neo-slave narratives and post-apartheid narratives share significant commonalities of tone, theme, and aesthetic imagination. My aim is to understand what we might encounter if we read these texts as of a kind, the kind being narratives of racial trauma. In that sense, I realize, I am creating the very category I seek to examine—it is because of their shared status as texts about racialized suffering that these African American and Black South African narratives can be read together, and it is because they can be read together that we can identify a category called narratives of racial trauma. Thinking specifically of Barnard’s call for the comparatist’s self-awareness, I admit to a particular motivation for the type of reading I embark on here. Already assuming a point of commonality, I am more interested in further imagining a black diaspora out of which arises a black subjectivity wrestling with the weight of memory. In other words, the hope animating this project is that by thinking comparatively about African American and Black South African narratives of trauma we might better understand how historically traumatized groups make sense of their history and imagine their future.

My assumption of a commonality between these two bodies of literature rests in large part on preceding scholarly work that traces points of convergence (and divergence) between the United States and the Republic of South Africa (RSA). George Frederickson, Rob Nixon, Rita Barnard, Kerry Bystrom, the numerous contributors to Safundi, the preeminent journal of comparative US and RSA studies—all of these scholars and others have laid the foundation for Prophetic Remembrance. For example, because of its particular focus (on African American and South African connections) and yet wide-ranging overview of the field, Stephane Robolin’s recent work goes a long way in further establishing cross-cultural links. Asserting that a variegated but sustained cultural relationship between black South Africans and African Americans has been ongoing since the late 1800s (Black 80), he traces two theoretical developments that have provided useful frameworks for black transnationalism: namely, the discourse of the Black Atlantic with its focus on the very connective tissue between black communities from across the African diaspora, absence of such connective tissue, and/or its changing terms; and the methodologies of the ever-expanding field of comparative US-RSA studies (again, particularly as embodied in Safundi), in which "in its broadest sense, the terms of relationality are based upon (a) what