Of belonging and becoming: Black Atlantic (inter-)cultural memory in the early autobiographies of Peter Abrahams and Es’kia Mphahlele

Peter Abrahams (1919-) was a major New African intellectual of the New African movement, a particular historical event consisting of intellectuals, writers, musicians, political leaders who – between 1904 and 1960 – constructed a singular form of modernity in South Africa known as ‘New African modernity’. One of the strongest outside forces influencing the construction of New African modernity was New Negro modernity in the USA. A singular achievement of Peter Abrahams was to have imported to South Africa the literary modernism of the Harlem Renaissance. One of the most salient features of Es’kia Mphahlele’s self-writing is the differential scope of cultural translation borne of the Black Atlantic ‘encounters’ that inform autobiographical writing ‘qua’ a simulacral cultural memory. The present author’s argument is that in Abrahams’ ‘Tell freedom’ (1954) and Mphahlele’s ‘Down Second Avenue’ (1959), the earlier autobiographies of Abrahams and Mphahlele, the memoric record of cultural displacement encapsulates the potential to reconfigure the subject of cultural discourse, where writing would reflect the manner in which the voyage out of racist South Africa was accompanied by immersions into, and constant reevaluations of, new modes of representation. Bibliogr., sum. [ASC Leiden abstract]