This Is Amerika: Dreaming of Kafka in FX’s Atlanta

This chapter follows the path that Ralph Ellison initiated in 1952, when he incorporated blues, jazz and gospel elements into the fibre of Invisible Man, his debut novel. I suggest that the path in question—which can be seen as continuing through soul, funk and hip-hop—extends into the FX television show, Atlanta. Its creator, Donald Glover, exploits the same vein of absurdist politics (albeit in a more comic fashion) whilst addressing the central question that animates this tradition: What is Blackness? I then argue that the progenitor of the tradition is Franz Kafka, and that the numerous uncanny and inspirited points of contact between the author’s work and Atlanta forge an intertextual relationship between the two—a relationship that could also be described as ‘adaptational.’ Moreover, just as Atlanta’s Afro-Kafkan interventions accentuate the politics of race, so too does Kafka’s first, abandoned, novel, Amerika, possess transnational elements that highlight ethnic difference, even (briefly) anticipating the notion of négritude. Finally, I suggest that the intertextual dynamic is most pronounced in Atlanta’s much-maligned third season, where the relocation to Europe exposes the undercurrent of frustration that brings German-Czech author and television show into a mutually revealing, transcultural exchange.