Bobby Seale's Grain of Sand: Toward an Analysis of Black Internationalism in 2666
Authors
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Tania Arabelle Flores
Stanford University
https://orcid.org/0009-0008-0915-6841
Abstract
Bobby Seale’s Grain of Sand: Toward an Analysis of the Afro-Atlantic Chronotopes in 2666 By tracing the intertextual links between Bobby Seale’s autobiography A Lonely Rage and Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666, this article proposes that the third part of Bolaño’s text experiments with the continuation of the act of writing Seale’s life as a means of thinking the futurity of political ideals as well as the temporality of the violence of modernity. I demonstrate that, in 2666, the rhetorical figure of the grain of sand—the most important of the images that Bolaño borrows from Seale—forms part of a system of Afro-Atlantic chronotopes. These chronotopes, in turn, evoke the transatlantic slave trade and its legacy of racial oppression and sketch the structural relation of slavery and racism to femicide on the U.S.-México border. This article delves into an understudied textual site in 2666 to indicate the value of Bolaño’s oeuvre for studies of blackness and the Afro-Atlantic in Latin America. Keywords: Bobby Seale, 2666, chronotope, Afro-Atlantic, intertextualKeywords:
Bobby Seale, 2666, Slave ship, Black internationalism, IntertextualityReferences
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