This book is about kinship in contemporary fiction from around the black Atlantic, and about the means these literary texts find to write diasporic kinship. The six novels considered here all explicitly engage with the meanings, experiences and practices of kinship in the context of multiple black Atlantic diasporas and in the wake of slavery and colonialism. Their interrogation and rewriting of discourses of intimate bonds imagines diasporic belonging, cultural production, and ethical relationality anew. The interest in interrogating and rethinking kinship in these novels, although not necessarily new in black Atlantic fiction, broadly coincides with a surge in queer writing from the Caribbean in the 1990s. Such fiction thus prefigures the ‘conjunctural moment’ of black/queer/diaspora proclaimed by some US-American scholars in the early twenty-first century. In my readings of these texts, I seek to generate a dialogue between the literary narrations of kinship and their reshaping of diaspora, on the one hand, and recent work by cultural theorists in diaspora studies and kinship studies on the other hand, and thus to suggest some ways in which scholars in the various fields that I draw on in this book might benefit from an engagement with each other's work, and with the literary texts in which both diverse cultural concepts and practices of kinship and the consequences of attempts to naturalize and valorize particular forms of kinship are explored. I focus on three key ways in which the novels wrestle with contemporary black Atlantic diasporic kinship: interrogating colonial– anthropological texts and discourses, exploring the limits of postcolonial historiography, and experimenting with literary–textual representations of queer diasporic relationality.

The understanding of diaspora which emerges from these texts suggests that black Atlantic diasporas, and the cultures and forms of subjectivity which they generate, cannot be fully understood without a critical analysis of kinship like the one I pursue here. These novels show that diaspora is fundamentally about a displacement from national norms of kinship and relationality, and thus a displacement from national—and colonial—norms of the ‘human’, and that diaspora therefore necessitates a rewriting of the presumed connections between kinship and culture.