Afrodemia

Abstract

This chapter examines the unique relationship between African American literature and the historically black institution, arguing that the cultural geographies that permeate the Black literary landscape comprise an academy of its own. This academy emerges in the afterlife of both African American literature and the historically black institution, enabling both to culminate their power through their interior essence. This chapter calls this interior essence Afrodemia—a physical space where learning and self-reflection proves a constant despite not constituting a static place. Afrodemia builds on Derrick Bell's short story “Afrolantica,” particularly, the “liberation of place not of mind” that a mass of land that solely grants access to African Americans engenders (Bell).The author examines Toni Morrison's novels Beloved and Paradise as evidencing Afrodemia in their depiction of griot figures who transform geographical space into a place of mental elevation and their challenge to the idea of paradise, fictional matrices that emerge as fact in the Black institution.