The Affiliative Relations of the Black Atlantic in John A. Williams’s The Man Who Cried I Am

Abstract

This article explores how African American identity relates to different national scenarios in John A. Williams’s 1967 novel The Man Who Cried I Am. In his book, Williams narrates the story of Max Reddick, a forty-nine-year-old African American writer who, in a span of two days, remembers his nomadic life from his latest sojourn in the Netherlands. The large array of geographies that the protagonist traverses through the story comes together under Paul Gilroy’s notion of the Black Atlantic, in that the “affiliative” relations, following Edward Said’s terminology, that the protagonist experiences across Europe, the US, and Africa unveils the ties that bring together Black people in the West. In this light, the article argues that these transnational affiliative ties contribute to reshaping African American identity in the post-World War II period.