Stuart Hall evocatively refers to traditional returns as a 'oneness' that provides a people with 'stable unchanging and continuous frames of reference and meaning, beneath the shifting divisions and vicissitudes of actual history' ('Cultural Identity' 393). While black Atlantic discourse, broadly construed, has undoubtedly been characterized by disparate, competing agendas, redemptive homecoming has been reproduced across social divides in a way that warrants framing it as an ideological dominant within transatlantic modernity.

Wanda's labor to politicize Evan's identity evokes the concern with literal and symbolic returns to Africa that has become a sine qua non in the thought of diasporic activists and aesthetes. Through its reinvention of the individual subject and the collective consciousness of thediaspora, this paradigm powerfully challenges European hegemony. No less alluring is this ideology's promise to reinvent Evan's identity by positioning him within a seamless continuum of kinship and communal belonging. Wanda employs familial rhetoric to encode a heroic pursuit of racial solidarity around the globe.

Influenced in part by his girlfriend Wanda, his 'moral touchstone,' Evan hopes that this transatlantic voyage will counter European designs 'to keep the black diaspora from ever coming home to reclaim the power of familyhood' (165). In the 1980s, Evan Norris, the narrator of Reginald McKnight's novel I Get on the Bus (1990), crosses the Atlantic from America to Africa under the sway of political currents that propelled a critical strain of diasporic theory in the twentieth century.

I Get on the Bus by Reginald McKnight