DISTANT SELVES
... it belongs to an imaginary geography and history which helps the mind to intensify its own sense of itself by dramatizing the difference between what is close to it and what is far away.
The paradox is that it was the uprooting of slavery and transportation into the plantation economy (as well as symbolic economy) of the Western World that unified these people across their differences in the same moment as it cut them off from direct access to their past ...
The Diasporic experience as I intend it here is defined not by essence or purity but by recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of “identity� that lives with and through, not despite difference ...
Cultural Identity is also a matter of becoming as much as being. It belongs as much to the future as the past...
... Different nationalist paradigms for thinking about cultural history fail when confronted by the intercultural and transnational formation that I call the Black Atlantic.
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