Ghostly Memories of Afro-Europeanness after the Great War in Esi Edugyan’s Half Blood Blues

Abstract

African Canadian author Esi Edugyan’s second novel Half Blood Blues, published in 2011, undertakes an excavation of the trajectories of different types of blackness across the convoluted history of Europe after the Great War and the Nazi regime by focusing on the tragic whereabouts of Afro-European denizen Hiero Falk and his jazz band. The story exemplifies the complex perception of the black subject’s European identity and its resilient attitude by unpacking their ghostly memories and the exclusionary racial policies in a continent caught up into different wars. Thus, using as a theoretical framework the politics of cultural memory alongside the aesthetics of the (postcolonial) gothic and its intersection with the workings of racialization this essay focuses on Edugyan’s retrieval of Afro-European memory haunted by a context of racial supremacy and erasure to outline the much needed dialogue between European history and its colonial endeavor.