Paper short abstract:

African-descended people can position themselves with a strong awareness of their part in the Western heritage, as we decolonize African influences on earlier Western culture. The paper shows the impact of African-based textualities on the shaping of artefacts in early modern English culture.

Paper long abstract:

People of African descent now have new means to position themselves in our global culture with a strong awareness of their vital contribution to what often seems to be only a Western heritage. In countering a Eurocentric design within the humanities, it is now becoming possible to decolonize and call attention to a pronounced African influence on early modern Western literary culture. It is thus not only regarding the 20th century that an undoing of colonial knowledges is highly desirable. Drawing on Ette’s “literature on the move” and also Glissant’s “poetics of relation”, this paper offers instances of the early modern wandering and dispersal of cultural knowledges and spiritualities from the ungeography of Africa toward western European and in particular English spaces of cultural production. Along the way, routes of mobile literary knowledge intersect each other in the 16th and 17th centuries. In these European spaces, African-based textualities and oralities become pervasive though conspicuously not usually acknowledged factors in the shaping of textual artefacts—which can now be read as imagining Africanness in unexpected ways. The individualized European agency emerges as the moving target of an array of African-based entities swarming toward and dislocating it, so that its action turns out to be borrowed. The ensuing epistemological and transtextual encounters empower innovative re-readings of English literary production. The Black presence in early modern western Europe is a composite carrier of resources of mobile cultural memory, which communicate the aesthetic imprint of that presence to white minds.