Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic Women’s Writing

Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic Women’s Writing PDF

Author: Jennifer Leetsch

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-07-16

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 3030677540

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This book sets out to investigate how contemporary African diasporic women writers respond to the imbalances, pressures and crises of twenty-first-century globalization by querying the boundaries between two separate conceptual domains: love and space. The study breaks new ground by systematically bringing together critical love studies with research into the cultures of migration, diaspora and refuge. Examining a notable tendency among current black feminist writers, poets and performers to insist on the affective dimension of world-making, the book ponders strategies of reconfiguring postcolonial discourses. Indeed, the analyses of literary works and intermedia performances by Chimamanda Adichie, Zadie Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, Shailja Patel and Warsan Shire reveal an urge of moving beyond a familiar insistence on processes of alienation or rupture and towards a new, reparative emphasis on connection and intimacy – to imagine possible inhabitable worlds.

Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic Women's Writing

Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic Women's Writing PDF

Author: Jennifer Leetsch

Publisher:

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783030677558

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

'This finger-on-the-pulse book draws together an exciting line-up of contemporary African diasporic women writers - Nigerian-American, Caribbean, Nigerian-British, Somali-British, and Kenyan-American. Attending to affect and intimacy as much as diasporic longing, this sparkling study provides sharp literary and theoretical insights in equal measure.' - Isabel Hofmeyr, Professor of African Literature, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa 'Bringing together affect studies with postcolonial theories of migration, displacement, and globalization, Jennifer Leetsch forcefully argues for the power of love in celebrated fictions by the most important African diaspora women writers today. Her meticulous and engaging readings of contemporary literature make a formidable case for how fiction can remake the world we live in to create space for better futures.' - Yogita Goyal, Professor of English and African American Studies, UCLA, USA This book sets out to investigate how contemporary African diasporic women writers respond to the imbalances, pressures and crises of twenty-first-century globalization by querying the boundaries between two separate conceptual domains: love and space. The study breaks new ground by systematically bringing together critical love studies with research into the cultures of migration, diaspora and refuge. Examining a notable tendency among current black feminist writers, poets and performers to insist on the affective dimension of world-making, the book ponders strategies of reconfiguring postcolonial discourses. Indeed, the analyses of literary works and intermedia performances by Chimamanda Adichie, Zadie Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, Shailja Patel and Warsan Shire reveal an urge of moving beyond a familiar insistence on processes of alienation or rupture and towards a new, reparative emphasis on connection and intimacy - to imagine possible inhabitable worlds. Jennifer Leetsch is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Würzburg, Germany. Her research focuses on affect, gender and the black diaspora, and she has previously published on desire in African diasporic novels, refugee imaginaries and migratory material cultures.

Diasporic Women's Writing of the Black Atlantic

Diasporic Women's Writing of the Black Atlantic PDF

Author: Emilia María Durán-Almarza

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-30

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 1136657053

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This book brings together a complete set of approaches to works by female authors that articulate the black Atlantic in relation to the interplay of race, class, and gender. The chapters provide the grounds to (en)gender a more complex understanding of the scattered geographies of the African diaspora in the Atlantic basin. The variety of approaches displayed bears witness to the vitality of a field that, over the years, has become a diasporic formation itself as it incorporates critical insights and theoretical frameworks from multiple disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities, thus exposing the manifold character of (black) diasporic interconnections within and beyond the Atlantic. Focusing on a wide array of contemporary literary and performance texts by women writers and performers from diverse locations including the Caribbean, Canada, Africa, the US, and the UK, chapters visit genres such as performance art, the novel, science fiction, short stories, and music. For these purposes, the volume is organized around two significant dimensions of diasporas: on the one hand, the material—corporeal and spatial—locations where those displacements associated with travel and exile occur, and, on the other, the fluid environments and networks that connect distant places, cultures, and times. This collection explores the ways in which women of African descent shape the cultures and histories in the modern, colonial, and postcolonial Atlantic worlds.

African Women Writing Diaspora

African Women Writing Diaspora PDF

Author: Rose A. Sackeyfio

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-04-26

Total Pages: 147

ISBN-13: 1793642443

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

African Women Writing Diaspora: Transnational Perspectives in the Twenty-First Century examines contemporary fiction by African women authors to resonate diaspora perspectives on what it means to be African within transnational spaces. Through a critical lens, the collection interrogates the ways in which women construct new ways of telling the African story in the global age of social, economic, and political transformation. African Women Writing Diaspora illustrates that for African women, life in the diaspora is an uncharted journey across new landscapes of identity beyond Africa’s borders as a unifying theme. The fictional works analyzed represent the leading women writers who dominate the African literary canon, and the contributors explore diverse themes of immigrant life, racialized identities, and otherness within transnational spaces of the west.

Emotional Transitions in Contemporary Afrodiasporic Women’s Writing

Emotional Transitions in Contemporary Afrodiasporic Women’s Writing PDF

Author: Ángela Suárez-Rodríguez

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-12-15

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13: 1003816274

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This book is an in-depth study of the category "stranger" as represented in four contemporary Afrodiasporic novels of female authorship: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, Sefi Atta’s A Bit of Difference, NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names and Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers. Examined from an interdisciplinary perspective that brings together different approaches to the figure of the stranger and Affect Theory, the plurality of experiences of estrangement, disorientation and unbelonging portrayed in these texts allows expansion upon Sara Ahmed’s (2000) investigation of "stranger fetishism" and, in so doing, contributes to the recent call for a more nuanced understanding of the idea of "stranger". In particular, the critical and comparative study of the different migration experiences of the protagonists reveals that, within the framework of the contemporary African diaspora to the West, "strange(r)ness" is a situated, embodied and emotional condition that depends on the politics of location and of identity from which it emerges. This book will particularly appeal to scholars and students in the fields of Postcolonial Studies, African Diaspora Studies and Black Women’s Literature, and will also be suitable for students at graduate and advanced undergraduate levels in English Studies.

West African Women in the Diaspora

West African Women in the Diaspora PDF

Author: Rose A. Sackeyfio

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-09-08

Total Pages: 112

ISBN-13: 1000474488

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This book examines fictional works by women authors who have left their homes in West Africa and now live as members of the diaspora. In recent years a compelling array of critically acclaimed fiction by women in the West African diaspora has shifted the direction of the African novel away from post-colonial themes of nationhood, decolonization and cultural authenticity, and towards explorations of the fluid and shifting constructions of identity in transnational spaces. Drawing on works by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Buchi Emecheta, Ama Ata Aidoo, Sefi Atta, Chika Unigwe and Taiye Selasie, this book interrogates the ways in which African diaspora women’s fiction portrays the realities of otherness, hybridity and marginalized existence of female subjects beyond Africa’s borders. Overall, the book demonstrates that life in the diaspora is an uncharted journey of expanded opportunities along with paradoxical realities of otherness. Providing a vivid and composite portrait of African women’s experiences in the diasporic landscape, this book will be of interest to researchers of migration and diaspora topics, and African, women’s and world literature.

The Routledge Handbook of the New African Diasporic Literature

The Routledge Handbook of the New African Diasporic Literature PDF

Author: Lokangaka Losambe

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-05-16

Total Pages: 591

ISBN-13: 1040013988

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The Routledge Handbook of the New African Diasporic Literature introduces world literature readers to the transnational, multivocal writings of immigrant African authors. Covering works produced in Europe, North America, and elsewhere in the world, this book investigates three major aesthetic paradigms in African diasporic literature: the Sankofan wave (late 1960s–early 1990s); the Janusian wave (1990s–2020s); and the Offshoots of the New Arrivants (those born and growing up outside Africa). Written by well-established and emerging scholars of African and diasporic literatures from across the world, the chapters in the book cover the works of well-known and not-so-well-known Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone writers from different theoretical positionalities and critical approaches, pointing out the unique innovative artistic qualities of this major subgenre of African literature. The focus on the “diasporic consciousness” of the writers and their works sets this handbook apart from others that solely emphasize migration, which is more of a process than the community of settled African people involved in the dynamic acts of living reflected in diasporic writings. This book will appeal to researchers and students from across the fields of Literature, Diaspora Studies, African Studies, Migration Studies, and Postcolonial Studies.

Opening Spaces

Opening Spaces PDF

Author: Yvonne Vera

Publisher: Heinemann

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 9780435910105

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In this anthology the award-winning author Yvonne Vera brings together the stories of many talented writers from different parts of Africa.

African Diasporic Women's Narratives

African Diasporic Women's Narratives PDF

Author: Simone A. James Alexander

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Published: 2014-06-03

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 0813048877

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

African Literature Association Book of the Year Award in Scholarship – Honorable Mention Using feminist and womanist theory, Simone Alexander takes as her main point of analysis literary works that focus on the black female body as the physical and metaphorical site of migration. She shows that over time black women have used their bodily presence to complicate and challenge a migratory process often forced upon them by men or patriarchal society. Through in-depth study of selective texts by Audre Lorde, Edwidge Danticat, Maryse Condé, and Grace Nichols, Alexander challenges the stereotypes ascribed to black female sexuality, subverting its assumed definition as diseased, passive, or docile. She also addresses issues of embodiment as she analyses how women’s bodies are read and seen; how bodies “perform” and are performed upon; how they challenge and disrupt normative standards. A multifaceted contribution to studies of gender, race, sexuality and disability issues, African Diasporic Women’s Narratives engages with a range of issues as it grapples with the complex interconnectedness of geography, citizenship, and nationalism.

The Search for Wholeness and Diaspora Literacy in Contemporary African American Literature

The Search for Wholeness and Diaspora Literacy in Contemporary African American Literature PDF

Author: Silvia Castro-Borrego

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2011-05-25

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 1443830372

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This volume has as a cohesive argument the exploration of the different manifestations of the search for wholeness and spirituality in the writings of contemporary African American women writers, covering different literary genres such as fiction (both novels and short stories), drama and poetry. Together with the issue of spirituality, the African American search for wholeness is analyzed as a source of creativity and agency. As expressed in the contemporary literature of black women writers, starting in the 1980s, the search for wholeness reflects a beauty realized through the healing of the spirit and the body, and is a process that takes on dimensions of reconciling the past and the present, the mythical and the real, the spiritual and the physical—all in the context of an emerging world view that welcomes synthesis and expects both synthesis and generative contradictions. The book will be a valuable collection for scholars of African American literature, comparative American Ethnic literature, American literature, and spirituality, as well as women’s studies. In addition, it will be an important text for both undergraduate and graduate students in those fields. As Professor Johnnella Butler (2006) points out, the African American search for wholeness is tightly linked to the search for freedom and agency. Ever since the 19th century, African American writers have given expression to an African American self which functions in Western civilization simultaneously as a “colonized” other and an assertive “self.” Due to the continuous ordeal of the African Diaspora, this self is caught in between the binaries proposed by the material and the spiritual world, seeking a balance where the person can become whole. The search for wholeness feeds from cultural roots that imply the presence of ancestral spiritualism, rememory, and double consciousness. Contemporary black women writers reflect the metaphor of building spiritual bridges, seeking the possibilities of building a bridge to the archetypal African past that is carried in their memories as a presence that offers sustenance via spiritual reconnection. Their works seek to bridge the gap between the myths and traditions of the past and contemporary African American culture. The texts included in this collection are examples of writing as an exercise of what Vévé Clark calls “Diaspora literacy.” The texts written by contemporary African American women writers explicitly show how to recognize and read the cultural signs left scattered along the road of progress. In this way, material acquisition is achieved along with cultural dispossession, becoming a metaphor for the history of the African in America. The powerful message is that one should not exclude the other.