Middle Passage to Freedom: Black Atlantic Consciousness in Charles Johnson's Middle Passage and S. I. Martin's Incomparable World

摘要

Charles Johnsonu27s novel, Middle Passage, and S.I. Martinu27s novel, Incomparable World, illustrate through mobile, culturally hybrid protagonists Paul Gilroyu27s notion of Black Atlantic consciousness, which is based on cultural hybridity and physical mobility across the Atlantic between Europe and Africa, America and the Caribbean. I argue that both novels blur the line between freedom and slavery, between oppressed and oppressor, and disrupt the links between blackness and slavery, between mobility and freedom. In both novels the diasporic Black Atlantic experiences privilege masculinity, since neither novel includes black women who can experience the mobility that the male protagonists do.