Black Comet Literatures: Reading for the Ephemeral Literary Histories of Pan- Africanism

Marina Bilbija • Wesleyan University

February 15th @ 6 P.M.
Zoom Conference: https://wesleyan.zoom.us/j/98396636283

In Anglophone texts by and about interwar Pan-Africanists, the comet is a recurring figure for fleeting yet world-shattering events. This talk examines the ephemeral and fatalistic connotations of this trope in the Nigerian Comet magazine, with special emphasis on its 1934 serialization of Ere Roosevelt Came, a novel set in the US, written by an itinerant Pan-African editor, and read by West Africans. Although conceived in the interstices between different Black literary traditions, this now largely-forgotten novel does not fit definitions of a world-literary text given its weak “influence” on any literary tradition. Texts like Ere Roosevelt Came highlight the difficulties of reconciling flashpoints and global circulations of ephemeral forms with the totalizing model of world literature. The heuristic of comet literatures swaps out the totality of the world for the gaseous, vanishing phenomenon of the comet as a figure for studying texts with global constellations but no lasting legacy.

Ephemera
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