Of Belonging and Becoming: Black Atlantic (Inter-)Cultural Memory in the Early Autobiographies of Peter Abrahams and Es’kia Mphahlele

Abstract

The article advances and refines Paul Gilroy’s oft-ignored characterisation of the Black Atlantic as an ‘assemblage’ in order to return to its Deleuzean provenance whereby an assemblage expresses a flux of becoming rather than a static belonging. In the autobiographies of Peter Abrahams and Es’kia Mphahlele becoming is evidenced by a sophisticated memoric repetition of Afro-American figures of memory, involving as they do lines of flight and, in the light of anticipated nomadic routes out of South Africa, an emerging intersubjectivity that goes beyond an imitative belonging to the Black Atlantic. Such a repetition, what Deleuze calls the third repetition, in cultural memory attests to a positively transculturative tension.