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African Diasporic Women's Narratives

African Diasporic Women's Narratives PDF Author: Simone A. James Alexander
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813048877
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Book Description
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.

African Diasporic Women's Narratives

African Diasporic Women's Narratives PDF Author: Simone A. James Alexander
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813048877
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Book Description
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.

Changing the Subject

Changing the Subject PDF Author: Merinda Simmons
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780814212622
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 172

Book Description
In Changing the Subject: Writing Women across the African Diaspora, K. Merinda Simmons argues that, in first-person narratives about women of color, contexts of migration illuminate constructions of gender and labor. These constructions and migrations suggest that the oft-employed notion of "authenticity" is not as useful a classification as many feminist and postcolonial scholars have assumed. Instead of relying on so-called authentic feminist journeys and heroines for her analysis, Simmons calls for a self-reflexive scholarship that takes seriously the scholar's own role in constructing the subject. The starting point for this study is the nineteenth-century Caribbean narrative The History of Mary Prince (1831). Simmons puts Prince's narrative in conversation with three twentieth-century novels: Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Gloria Naylor's Mama Day, and Maryse Condé's I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. She incorporates autobiography theory to shift the critical focus from the object of study--slave histories--to the ways people talk about those histories and to the guiding interests of such discourses. In its reframing of women's migration narratives, Simmons's study unsettles theoretical certainties and disturbs the very notion of a cohesive diaspora.

Diasporic Women's Writing of the Black Atlantic

Diasporic Women's Writing of the Black Atlantic PDF Author: Emilia María Durán-Almarza
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136657053
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Book Description
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.

West African Women in the Diaspora

West African Women in the Diaspora PDF Author: Rose A. Sackeyfio
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781032113098
Category : African diaspora in literature
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description
"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"--

Gendering Knowledge in Africa and the African Diaspora

Gendering Knowledge in Africa and the African Diaspora PDF Author: Toyin Falola
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351711210
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Book Description
Gendering Knowledge in Africa and the African Diaspora addresses the question of to what extent the history of gender in Africa is appropriately inscribed in narratives of power, patriarchy, migration, identity and women and men’s subjection, emasculation and empowerment. The book weaves together compelling narratives about women, men and gender relations in Africa and the African Diaspora from multidisciplinary perspectives, with a view to advancing original ways of understanding these subjects. The chapters achieve three things: first, they deliberately target long-held but erroneous notions about patriarchy, power, gender, migration and masculinity in Africa and of the African Diaspora, vigorously contesting these, and debunking them; second, they unearth previously marginalized and little known his/herstories, depicting the dynamics of gender and power in places ranging from Angola to Arabia to America, and in different time periods, decidedly gendering the previously male-dominated discourse; and third, they ultimately aim to re-write the stories of women and gender relations in Africa and in the African Diaspora. As such, this work is an important read for scholars of African history, gender and the African Diaspora. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of African Studies, Diaspora Studies, Gender and History.

West African Women in the Diaspora

West African Women in the Diaspora PDF Author: Rose A. Sackeyfio
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000474488
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 112

Book Description
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.

Difficult Diasporas

Difficult Diasporas PDF Author: Samantha Pinto
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814759483
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
In this comparative study of contemporary Black Atlantic women writers, Samantha Pinto demonstrates the crucial role of aesthetics in defining the relationship between race, gender, and location. Thinking beyond national identity to include African, African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Black British literature, Difficult Diasporas brings together an innovative archive of twentieth-century texts marked by their break with conventional literary structures. These understudied resources mix genres, as in the memoir/ethnography/travel narrative Tell My Horse by Zora Neale Hurston, and eschew linear narratives, as illustrated in the book-length, non-narrative poem by M. Nourbese Philip, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks. Such an aesthetics, which protests against stable categories and fixed divisions, both reveals and obscures that which it seeks to represent: the experiences of Black women writers in the African Diaspora. Drawing on postcolonial and feminist scholarship in her study of authors such as Jackie Kay, Elizabeth Alexander, Erna Brodber, Ama Ata Aidoo, among others, Pinto argues for the critical importance of cultural form and demands that we resist the impulse to prioritize traditional notions of geographic boundaries. Locating correspondences between seemingly disparate times and places, and across genres, Pinto fully engages the unique possibilities of literature and culture to redefine race and gender studies. Samantha Pinto is Assistant Professor of Feminist Literary and Cultural Studies in the English Department at Georgetown University. In the American Literatures Initiative

African Women Writing Diaspora

African Women Writing Diaspora PDF Author: Rose A. Sackeyfio
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793642443
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 147

Book Description
African Women Writing Diaspora examines the works of contemporary African female writers through diaspora perspectives on the constructions of identity in transnational spaces. 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.

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
ISBN: 3030677540
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Book Description
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.

The Birth of Cool

The Birth of Cool PDF Author: Carol Tulloch
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474262864
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
It is broadly recognized that black style had a clear and profound influence on the history of dress in the twentieth century, with black culture and fashion having long been defined as 'cool'. Yet despite this high profile, in-depth explorations of the culture and history of style and dress in the African diaspora are a relatively recent area of enquiry. The Birth of Cool asserts that 'cool' is seen as an arbiter of presence, and relates how both iconic and 'ordinary' black individuals and groups have marked out their lives through the styling of their bodies. Focusing on counter- and sub-cultural contexts, this book investigates the role of dress in the creation and assertion of black identity. From the gardenia corsage worn by Billie Holiday to the work-wear of female African-Jamaican market traders, through to the home-dressmaking of black Britons in the 1960s, and the meaning of a polo-neck jumper as depicted in a 1934 self-portrait by African-American artist Malvin Gray Johnson, this study looks at the ways in which the diaspora experience is expressed through self-image. Spanning the late nineteenth century to the modern day, the book draws on ready-made and homemade fashion, photographs, paintings and films, published and unpublished biographies and letters from Britain, Jamaica, South Africa, and the United States to consider how personal style statements reflect issues of racial and cultural difference. The Birth of Cool is a powerful exploration of how style and dress both initiate and confirm change, and the ways in which they expresses identity and resistance in black culture.