This essay compares Morrison's Paradise and Wicomb's David's Story to explore corresponding machinations of memory operating in both novels' featured communities of resistance. Tracing the ways in which women and memory figure as potential threats to stabilized order and established truth, this essay argues that the management of collective memory peculiarly resembles the containment of women in racialized societies, the United States and South Africa. This observation about what is called "loose memory" alerts us to the dangers of foundationalist regimes of Truth and Reality. It also points to alternative, "loosening" narrative strategies that Morrison's and Wicomb's novels model.

Part literary history, part cultural study, this book examines the relationships and exchanges between black South African and African American writers who sought to create common ground throughout the antiapartheid era. The book argues that the authors' geographic imaginations crucially defined their individual interactions and, ultimately, the literary traditions on both sides of the Atlantic. Subject to the tyranny of segregation, authors such as Richard Wright, Bessie Head, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Michelle Cliff, and Richard Rive charted their racialized landscapes and invented freer alternative geographies. They crafted rich representations of place to challenge the stark social and spatial arrangements that framed their lives. Those representations, the book contends, also articulated their desires for black transnational belonging and political solidarity. The first book to examine U.S. and South African literary exchanges in spatial terms, it identifies key moments in this understudied history of black cross-cultural exchange, exposing how geography serves as an indispensable means of shaping and reshaping modern racial meaning.

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