Reclaiming History

This dissertation provides a study of the anticipatory signs of the emerging postcolonial consciousness in three mid-century novels of the African Diaspora: Camara Laye's The Dark Child, Margaret Walker's Jubilee, and Orlando Patterson's Die the Long Day. Inspired by Genevi¿ Fabre and Robert O'Meally who have highlighted how African-American cultural producers revise history through lieux de m¿ires, this analysis argues that these three transnational writers- respectively from West Africa, the United States and Jamaica ¿ reclaim in their ¿willfully¿ constructed sites their past that had been marginalized and distorted in documents authorizing history. Paying careful attention to the context of their utterances and their intertextual relationships with antecendent Euro-centered traditional histories and fictions, this study attempts to show how these writers of the African Diaspora supplant the representational practices, counter the ideological discourses, and correct the misrepresentations embedded in ¿colonial¿ textuality. In addition, it examines the various tools these three writers employ to reclaim effectively their history. Whereas Laye utilizes narrative voice to shape his autobiographical novel into a lieu de m¿ire, Margaret Walker employs music as an unassailable tool of reconstructive history, and Orlando Patterson crafts sociological data into his literary structure