Book Review: Kinship across the black Atlantic: writing diasporic relations by Gigi Adair, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2019, 210 pp., £80.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-789-62037-5

Abstract

In Kinship Across the Black Atlantic, Gigi Adair furthers the work on diaspora studies of critics such as Paul Gilroy and James Clifford to expand their views towards a necessary “queering of diaspora” (11). According to her, “queering” in this context does not only refer to issues of sexuality, but to transcending the conception that culture and com- munity can only be perpetuated through linear filiation. Keeping in mind that biological kinship is still a powerful mechanism for neo colonial control, Adair reads six novels across six chapters by authors belonging to black Atlantic traditions that engage in its reconceptualization. The book’s analyses are organized into three sections, each of which attempts to destabilize one of three key concepts: anthropology, historiography, and diasporic relationality, respectively.