Caryl Phillips' The Nature of Blood
On its most immediate level, Caryl Phillips’ The Nature of Blood narrates several stories of the Jewish Diaspora, using the familiar Shakespearean character Othello to provide a counterpoint to the others’ experiences of displacement. The Nature of Blood thus initially seems to fit awkwardly among texts by other West Indian authors who use the Caribbean as the setting of their work or incorporate West Indian characters into their work. Through his multi-stranded narrative, however, Phillips creates a geographical setting that mirrors the multi-regional influence of the Caribbean. The triangular space of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa shaped by the character’s stories parallels the historical and cultural exchange among Europe, North America, and Africa: the triangular trade which produced the African diaspora. Unlike people of African descent in mainland North America, those of Caribbean background have historically had a more fragmented allegiance to home, negotiating between African and European influences. Likewise, The Nature of Blood illustrates its characters’ discomfort in claiming one particular space as home and in maintaining ties to one space as they move to another.
Each of the characters in The Nature of Blood illustrates the challenges that geography, culture, and memory pose to claiming a singular home. Moshe and Eva, both affected by the Holocaust, convey ambivalence as they seek literal geographical spaces in which to rebuild their lives. Malka’s relocation includes the additional obstacle of cultural and racial differences which mark her past home and prevent her from assimilation in her new space even as she attempts to leave her old one behind. And, Stephan ...
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...of such futile negotiation between past and present, The Nature of Blood thus issues an admonishment against the shunning of hybridity. Although issues of geography, culture, and memory continue to burden the Caribbean, its embrace of hybridity places the region on the path to resolving its identity and mapping its destiny.
Works Cited
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This week’s articles carry a couple related, if not common, themes of imagined, if not artificial, constructs of race and identity. Martha Hodes’ article, “The mercurial Nature and Abiding Power of Race: A Transnational Family Story,” offers a narrative based examination of the malleable terms on which race was defined. To accomplish this she examines the story of Eunice Connolly and her family and social life as a window into understanding the changing dimensions of race in nineteenth-century America and the Caribbean, specifically New England and Grand Cayman. While Hodes’ article examines the construction of race in the Americas, Ali A. Mazrui’s piece, “The Re-Invention of Africa: Edward Sai, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Beyond,” looks at the construction of African identity. Although different in geographic loci, the two articles similarly examine the shaping influences of race and identity and the power held in ‘the Other’ to those ends.
In Brent Hayes Edwards essay, “ The Use of Diaspora”, the term “African Diaspora” is critically explored for its intellectual history of the word. Edward’s reason for investigating the “intellectual history of the term” rather than a general history is because the term “is taken up at a particular conjecture in black scholarly discourse to do a particular kind of epistemological work” (Edwards 9). At the beginning of his essay Edwards mentions the problem with the term, in terms of how it is loosely it is being used which he brings confusion to many scholars. As an intellectual Edwards understands “the confusing multiplicity” the term has been associated with by the works of other intellectuals who either used the coined or used the term African diaspora. As an articulate scholar, Edwards hopes to “excavate a historicized and politicized sense of diaspora” through his own work in which he focuses “on a black cultural politics in the interwar, particularly in the transnational circuits of exchange between the Harlem Renaissance and pre-Negritude Fran cophone activity in the France and West Africa”(8). Throughout his essay Edwards logically attacks the problem giving an informative insight of the works that other scholars have contributed to the term Edwards traces back to the intellectual history of the African diaspora in an eloquent manner.
Maryse Conde’s novel Segu tells the vivid story of a family hurtled into the chaos of a rapidly changing world. Conde does a phenomenal job of putting readers into the mindset of her many colorful characters allowing readers access to thoughts and motivations behind these characters’ actions. The story is exceptionally intricate and yet the individual stories all feel interconnected back to the Traore family who are the focus point of the novel. Various themes all play a part in the telling of Segu. From religion to the transatlantic slave trade, from family to commerce, all these themes come together to form a story that ultimately spans cultures, continents, and centuries. This paper will be focusing on the themes of family and religion.
...e, history, and blood. The specific commingling that emerges, however, has common roots in its very diversity. Throughout her tale Menchaca's allegiance is clearly to her race, and while the bias comes through, the history she traces is never the less compelling. The strongest achievement of this book is that it fundamentally shifts the gaze of its reader by reifying race and celebrating its complexity.
The second portion of the semester has had a focus on how the Holocaust has continued to cause devastation and familial conflict even after the war ended. Of the texts we have read, Maus by Art Speigelman and Still Alive by Ruth Kluger were two very different accounts of the Holocaust, however there was one strong continuity between the texts: the effects of the Holocaust were not exclusive to any single person or family, survivors and their offspring continued to suffer long after escaping the camps. The constant tension documented in Maus between Speigelman and his father was not exclusive to their family as Holocaust survivors; Ruth Kluger also incorporates her family struggles into her book by detailing the differences between her and her mother, even after her mother has passed away. Because their experiences differ, with Speigelman being the son of a Holocaust victim and Kluger actually enduring it, the texts took different forms, both linguistically and aesthetically, to communicate their messages of familial conflict.
...spoke a Spanish Creole. This made a clear distinction between the two and made it easy for the government to identify the difference. The reader sees how such themes of Birth and Death show so prominently throughout the characters that one must focus on how birth and deaths affect the concept of the individual relating to their own Negritude. It is culture, not skin tones but rather the beliefs and values that each country be it Haiti or Dominican Republic relate to. Danticat’s novel helps us understand the strengths and limits that Rene Depestre states in The Birth of Caribbean Civilisation “there is a progressive ‘negritude’ that expounds the need to rise above all the alienations of man . . . and there is “an irrational reactionary and mystic version of ‘negritude’ which serves . . . as a cultural base for neo-colonialist penetration into our countries” (244).
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In accordance to African American writer Margaret Walker’s quote that talks about African Americans still having their African past intact despite slavery and racism, immigration indeed affected cultural ways. The interconnection of the trans-Atlantic world brought about the rise of new cultures, music and expressions that were to be held by future generations, which is now the population of African American people. This paper will research on the middle passage and the early American slavery and how African tried to resist.
This raises another question on how do we see blacks in Canada, in the Caribbean, in Germany and in Britain. In the essay written by Jaqueline Nassy Brown, Diaspora and Desire: Gendering “Black America” in Black Liverpool, she states, “That there is not actual space that one could call the African Diaspora…” (73). Brown argues “Diaspora” has become a buzzword for globalization discourse and that is commonly mapped space for racial formation (74). In addition, Brown contents gendered ideologies between black Liverpool and black America are social spaces that are experience, bridged, and traversed differently (75). Brown’s ethnographic research investigated black identity of black Liverpudlians beginning in World War II and the Civil Rights Movement in correlation to their relationship with black Americans. She point outs the sexist dynamics between black male and black female Liverpudlians. The black men who were predominately seaman relocated from Africa refuse to date black Liverpudlians women and married white English or Irish women. Their mulatto children produced from this union where called “half castes” (76) and struggled with their identity of blackness due to the fact their African fathers refuse to discuss Africa. Their experience and desire to understand blackness was much different from local black Liverpudlians. Interestingly, when black American GI’s came to Liverpool it created three geographical spaces: first, the introduction to black culture and music; second, the production of black hierarchy of black American GI’s; and lastly, the migration black Liverpudlians women marrying the GI’s to live the American Dream
The ocean is what connects the people of the Caribbean to their African descendants in and out of time. Through the water they made it to their respective islands, and they, personally, crafted it to be temporal and made it a point of reference. The ocean is without time, and a speaker of many languages, with respect to Natasha Omise’eke Tinsley’s Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic. The multilingualism of the ocean is reminiscent that there is no one Caribbean experience. The importance of it indicates that the Afro-Caribbean identity is most salient through spirituality. It should come to no surprise that Erzulie, a Haitian loa, is a significant part of the migration of bodies in Ana Maurine Lara’s Erzulie’s Skirt. Ana Maurine Lara’s depiction
Gabriel, Deborah. Layers of Blackness: Colourism in the African Diaspora. London: Imani Media, 2007. Print.
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McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian: In the Evening Redness in the West. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print
One of the most baffling aspects of European interest in African people is the civilizations collective distaste of and fascination with people of African descent. The initial journey into Africa, and the planning that preceded it, spawned many of the most enlightening theories about African people. These theories, usually in support of African savagery and inferiority and in favor of European superiority and civility were based in the colonial mentalities of that time. Of the most notable theories is the idea that African religious system was pagan and that African people were inferior because of their darker skin pigmentation and “beast-like” nature. These theories dispersed rapidly across the globe, and even today people of African-descent collectively, however subconsciously, grow into them. Moving forward, how are these theories presented in post-modern works of literature? Equally so, how do authors weave the colonial and post-colonial mentalities into the framework of certain texts. Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage advances both colonial mentalities as well as post-colonial perspectives. The novel sheds light on traditional European colonial notions African savagery, the inferiority of African people as sub-human and commodities, and—at the same instant—presents the post-colonial perspective of the archetypical American Negro serving as a “middle man” between Europeans and Africans.
I will be investigating Human Blood as my specific tissue and giving an overview on the location, characteristics, and the benefits it has to the human body. Blood is extracellular matrix that is consists of plasma, red blood cells, platelets, and white blood cells. Blood is located within the capillaries/veins/arteries of the human body, which are blood vessels that run through the entire body. These blood vessels allow the blood to flow smoothly and quickly from the heart to distinct parts of the human body. The unique parts of human blood all work together for a purpose: the Red Blood Cells(erythrocytes) transports oxygen throughout the body, White Blood Cells(leukocytes) play a part in the bodies immune system, Platelets(thrombocytes) assist in creating scabs,