Putting 'Presence into Absence': Re-visiting Black Diasporic History through Bernardine Evaristo's Soul Tourists

This paper explores Bernardine Evaristo's Soul Tourists (2005) as a source of re-writing/revisiting black diasporic history. Through the protagonists, Stanley and Jessie, the writer examines stories which have remained obscured since centuries. Ghosts of historical black figures, which haunt Europe, appear to Stanley and through a dialogue between them, Evaristo makes Stanley re-discover the past. With questions of identity and belonging, the protagonists decide to take their specific journeys which is physical and metaphorical at the same time. Their journeys, however, detour from Paul Gilroy's insistence on the Middle Passage and take an alternate route that connects Europe with Africa. Therefore, with the help of critiques on Gilroy's theories, pointed out in The Black Atlantic, the paper argues that through an insistence on road travel across spaces/places, initiated by a black British woman, the novel seeks to encode black 'presences' beyond the Anglophone world and, consequently, induce a symbolic value to Africa.