Africanist presence; black feminist criticism; Communism; Czechoslovakia; ideology; Toni Morrison; racism; Tomáš Zmeškal

In her landmark essay, ?In Search of Our Mothers? Gardens? (1974), Alice Walker urges black feminist critics to look both high and low in order to restore an artistic tradition of black women. Two decades later, in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), Toni Morrison shifts the textual terrain of black (feminist) literary criticism beyond the realm of black authors to explore ?the Africanist presence? in the fiction of white American canonical authors. Following her lead and Ann DuCille?s recent suggestion that perhaps the time has come for black feminists ?to light out for other territories,? this paper offers a black feminist reading of Tomáš Zmeškal?s novel Životopis černobílého jehněte [The Biography of the Black-and-White Lamb] (2009) to examine the perception of ?the Africanist presence? in Communist Europe.

In her landmark essay, ?In Search of Our Mothers? Gardens? (1974), Alice Walker urges black feminist critics to look both high and low in order to restore an artistic tradition of black women. Two decades later, in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), Toni Morrison shifts the textual terrain of black (feminist) literary criticism beyond the realm of black authors to explore ?the Africanist presence? in the fiction of white American canonical authors. Following her lead and Ann DuCille?s recent suggestion that perhaps the time has come for black feminists ?to light out for other territories,? this paper offers a black feminist reading of Tomáš Zmeškal?s novel Životopis černobílého jehněte [The Biography of the Black-and-White Lamb] (2009) to examine the perception of ?the Africanist presence? in Communist Europe.