DISTANT SELVES

... it belongs to an imaginary geography and history which helps the mind to intensify its own sense of itself by dramatiz-ing the difference between what is close to it and what is far away.

The paradox is that it was the uprooting of slavery and transporta-tion into the plantation economy (as well as symbolic economy) of the Western World that unified these people across their differ-ences in the same moment as it cut them off from direct access to their past ...

The Diasporic experience as I intend it here is defined not by essence or purity but by recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of “identity” that lives with and through, not despite difference ...

Cultural Identity is also a matter of becoming as much as be-ing. It belongs as much to the future as the past...

... Different nationalist paradigms for thinking about cultural history fail when confronted by the intercultural and transna-tional formation that I call the Black Atlantic.

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