1st Edition

Diasporic Women’s Writing of the Black Atlantic (En)Gendering Literature and Performance

    246 Pages
    by Routledge

    258 Pages
    by Routledge

    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.

    Introduction: (En)Gendering the Black Atlantic Part I. Diasporic Materialities A. Body Politics 1. Seeing Black and the Color of Representation Fo Wilson  2. ‘i think i might be broken’. The Reconstitution of Black Atlantic Bodies and Memories in Sharon Bridgforth’s Delta Dandi Ana-Maurine Lara  3. Black British Women’s Literature and the Politics of Hair Tracey L Walters B. Reconfiguring Space 4. Lyrical Cartographies: Re-Drawing the Boundaries of the Black Atlantic in Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return and At the Full and Change of the Moon Mathilde Mergeai  5. Diasporic Caribbean Women Transcending Dystopian Spaces and Reconnecting Fragmented Identities in Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring and Midnight Robber Myriam Moïse  6. The Black Atlantic and Home: Women and Migrations in Lauretta Ngcobo’s And They Didn’t Die and Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins Carolyn Hart  7. Roots and Rootedness: Unearthing (En)gendered Identities in Donna Weir-Soley’s First Rain Claudia May  Part II. Diasporic Journeys A. Re-Routing The Black Atlantic 8. The Dancing Couple in Black Atlantic Space Ananya Kabir  9. Mapping Transatlantic Feminist Cartographies through Black Atlantic Cinema Emilia María Durán Almarza  10. Negotiating Belonging: Yvonne Vera’s Politics of Location Anna-Leena Toivanen  B. M/Othering The Black Atlantic 11. M/Othering Black Female Subjectivity across the Black Atlantic in the Novels of Maryse Condé, Edwidge Danticat, and Elizabeth Nunez Ana María Fraile-Marcos  12. The Sea-People of  Nalo Hopkinson’s The New Moon’s Arms: Reconceptualizing Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic through Considerations of Myth and Motherhood Giselle Liza Anatol

    Biography

    Emilia María Durán-Almarza is Assistant Professor of English in the Department of English Philology, Universidad de Oviedo, Spain.

    Esther Álvarez López is Associate Professor of English in the Department of English Philology, Universidad de Oviedo, Spain.