1st Edition
Women on the Move Body, Memory and Femininity in Present-Day Transnational Diasporic Writing
Women on the Move: Body, Memory and Feminity in Present-day Transnational Diasporic Writing explores the role of women in the current globailized era as active migrants. Silvia Pellicer-Ortín and Julia Kuznetski have brought together a collection of essays from scholars in diaspora, migration and gender studies to take a look at the female experince of migration and globalization by covering topics such as vulnerability, empowerment, trauma, identity, memory, violence and gender contruction, which will continue to shape contemporary literature and the culture at large.
Acknowledgments
Notes on Contributors
Foreword
Disturbing Transitions: Critical Inner Landscapes of Migration
Jill Lewis
Introduction
The Female Body and Self in the Glocal: Plights and Opportunities for Contemporary Diasporic Women
Silvia Pellicer-Ortín and Julia Kuznetski
SECTION 1
Unbelonginess and Displacement in the Diaspora: Finding a Voice Through Narrative
1 The Travelling Bodies of African Prostitutes in the Transnational Space in Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail (2006) and Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street (2009)
Ceìdric Courtois
2 A Traumatic Romance of (Un)Belonginess: NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names
Merve Sarikaya-Şen
SECTION 2
Globality, Locality and Cosmpolitanism
3 Dancing Across Nations: The Transnational and the Glocal in Zadie Smith’s Swing Time
Beatriz Pérez Zapata
4 Taiye Selasi and the Afropolitan Daughters of the Diaspora
María Rocío Cobo-Piñero
SECTION 3
Defining Feminine Spaces: Home, Self, Identity and Food
5 "By Way of Their Fingers": Making Sense of Self and Home in Selected Short Stories by Edwidge Danticat, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Corinne Bigot
6 In the Kitchen with Monica Ali: Flavouring Gender and Diaspora
Chiara Battisti and Sidia Fiorato
SECTION 4
Femininity, Spatiality and Liminality
7 Recalling Female Migration in Contemporary Irish Novels: An Intersectional Approach
Maria Amor Barros-del Río
8 Liminality and Affective Mobility in Anne Enright’s The Green Road
Selen Aktari-Sevgi
9 Movement, Places and Knotted History in Charlotte Mendelson’s Almost English
Julia Kuznetski
SECTION 5
Crossing Borders: Female Bodies and Identities in Transit
10 Travelling the US-Mexican Border, Challenging Chicanidad
Paul Rüsse and Maialen Antxustegi-Etxarte
11 Under the Skin of British History: Bodies in Transit in Andrea Levy’s Small Island
Carolina Sánchez-Palencia
12 Short Stories on the Move: Mapping Memory and Constructing the (Jewish) Diasporic Female Self in Michelene Wandor’s False Relations
Silvia Pellicer-Ortín
Index
Biography
Silvia Pellicer-Ortín is a Lecturer in the Department of English and German Philology at the University of Zaragoza, Spain.
Julia Kuznetski is Associate Professor of British Literature and curator of Liberal Arts in Humanities programme at Tallinn University, Estonia.
"A most timely, informative, cross-cultural, and interdisciplinary study on literature’s potential to explore the representation of femininity in contemporary diasporic narratives in English." -- Dolores Herrero, University of Zaragoza, Spain.
"A must-read in Humanities to understand what story-telling may be about in a world of changes, crises and (self-)reconstruction." -- Nathalie Vincent-Arnaud, Professor of English, Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, Toulouse, France.