Writing the Black Diasporic City in the Age of Globalization
Carol Bailey
Rutgers University Press
Writing the Black Diasporic City in the Age of Globalization theorizes the city as a generative, “semicircular” social space, where the changes of globalization are most profoundly experienced. The fictive accounts analyzed here configure cities as spaces where movement is simultaneously restrictive and liberating, and where life prospects are at once promising and daunting.
In their depictions of the urban experiences of peoples of African descent, writers and other creative artists offer a complex set of renditions of 20th- and 21st-century Black urban citizens’ experience in European or Euro-dominated cities such as Boston, London, New York, and Toronto, as well as Global South cities such as Accra, Kingston, and Lagos—that emerged out of colonial domination, and which have emerged as hubs of current globalization.