SOURCE: Okpewho, Isidore. “Walcott, Homer, and the ‘Black Atlantic.’” Research in African Literatures 33, no. 1 (2002): 27-44.

In the following essay, Okpewho examines Walcott's themes of journey, voyage, and cultural identity within the context of African Caribbean literary discourse.

I

In exploring Derek Walcott's abiding recourse to Homer in his creative writing, I have chosen to invoke the discursive paradigm recently advertised by Paul Gilroy in his book because whatever problems we may agree it creates in its analysis of the condition of blacks in Western society, the book has at any rate invited us to rethink familiar assumptions about questions of self-apprehension created by centuries of stressful relations between peoples of African and European descent. In formulating his concept of a “black Atlantic,” Gilroy abjures all obsessive attachment to an African racial antecedence, embracing in the process a modernist consciousness that entails, as he puts it (following Habermas), “a...