Literature and Culture in the Black Atlantic (PDF)

KOFI OMONIYI SYLVANUS CAMPBELL is Assistant Professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University, Brantford Campus, USA.

'There is much to admire in Literature and Culture in the Black Atlantic: its erudition, its originality, its verve. What sets Campbell's book apart is its sophisticated deployment of Caribbean-derived models of hybridity and time, and its twinned emphasis on Africa in the medieval imagination and the contemporary Black Atlantic. Campbell's scholarship is an important and ambitious contribution; absolutely essential reading for medievalists and postcolonial theorists alike.' - Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Professor of English, George Washington University, author of The Postcolonial Middle Ages and Hybridity, Identity and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain

'In Kofi Campbell's Literature and Culture in the Black Atlantic we have a new medievalism at work in the most intelligent and original version. Here, the cultural discourse of the Middle Ages, with all its claims and anxieties, is finally confronted with the project of the Black Atlantic. This book shows how a new kind of comparative literary studies, one cutting across geographies, periods, and disciplines, can enrich scholarship. The range of writers covered here is impressive and the discussion of cross cultural encounters and the texts that enable them is rich.' Simon Gikandi, Professor of English, Princeton University, author of Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature and Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism

'This is a fascinating and ambitious study, which seeks to provide a cultural genealogy for Paul Gilroy's conception of the Black Atlantic. By reading modern Caribbean literature in the context of pre-modern constructions of African identity, Campbell offers a daring new perspective on modern constructions of nation, ethnicity, and race.' - Suzanne Akbari, Associate Professor of English, Medieval Studies, and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto, author of Seeing Through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory

'Kofi Campbell