Emotional Transitions in Contemporary Afrodiasporic Women’s Writing

Emotional Transitions in Contemporary Afrodiasporic Women’s Writing
Author: Ángela Suárez-Rodríguez
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 166
Release: 2023-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1003816274

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.

The Productivity of Negative Emotions in Postcolonial Literature

The Productivity of Negative Emotions in Postcolonial Literature
Author: Jean-François Vernay
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2024-11-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1040255493

This volume explores the possibilities and potentialities of “negative” affect in postcolonial literature and literary theory, featuring work on postcolonial studies, First Nations studies, cognitive cultural studies, cognitive historicism, reader response theory, postcolonial feminist studies, and trauma studies. The chapters of this work investigate negative affect in all its types and dimensions: analyses of the structures of feeling created by socio-political forces; assemblages and alliances produced by negative emotion; enactive interrelationships of emotion and environment; and the ethical implications of emotional response, to name a few. It seeks to rebrand “negative” emotions as productive forces which can paradoxically confer pleasure, agential power, and social progress through literary representation.

Affect, Performativity, and Chinese Diasporas in the Caribbean

Affect, Performativity, and Chinese Diasporas in the Caribbean
Author: Elena Igartuburu García
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 120
Release: 2024-02-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1003838227

Affect, Performativity, and Chinese Diasporas in the Caribbean: Hopeful Futures analyzes the emergence of Chinese diasporic literature and art in the Caribbean and its diasporas in the twenty-first century. This book considers the historical and critical discourse about the Chinese diasporas in the Caribbean and proposes a textual and visual archive selecting contemporary texts that signal a changing paradigm in postcolonial literature at the turn of the twenty-first century. Whereas, historically, Chinese minorities had been erased or presented as ultimate Others, contemporary texts mobilize Chinese characters and their stories strategically to propose alternative configurations of community and belonging grounded in affective structures and contest the coloniality of national imaginaries.

Rehumanizing Muslim Subjectivities

Rehumanizing Muslim Subjectivities
Author: Aroosa Kanwal
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 119
Release: 2024-01-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1003835686

Rehumanizing Muslim Subjectivities: Postcolonial Geographies, Postcolonial Ethics is a timely and urgent monograph, allowing us to imagine what it feels like to be the victim of genocide, abuse, dehumanization, torture and violence, something which many Muslims in Palestine, Kashmir, Pakistan, Myanmar, Syria, Iraq and China have to endure. Most importantly, the book emphasizes the continued relevance of creative literature’s potential to intervene in and transform our understanding of a conceptual and political field, as well as advanced technologies of power and domination. The book makes a substantial theoretical contribution by drawing on wide-ranging angles and dimensions of contemporary drone warfare and its related catastrophes, postcolonial ethics in relation to the thanatopolitics of slow violence, dehumanization and the politics of death. Against the backdrop of such institutionalized and diverse acts of violence committed against Muslim communities, I call the postcolonial Muslim world ‘geographies of dehumanization’. The book investigates how ongoing legacies of contemporary forms of injustice and denial of subjecthood are represented, staged and challenged in a range of postcolonial anglophone Muslim texts, thereby questioning the idea of postcolonial ethics. One of the selling points of this book is the chapters on fictional representations by Muslim Myanmar and Uyghur writers as, to the best of my knowledge, no critical work or single authored book is available on Myanmar and Uyghur literature to date.

Christianity and the African Counter-Discourse in Achebe and Beti

Christianity and the African Counter-Discourse in Achebe and Beti
Author: Ali Yiğit
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 165
Release: 2024-05-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1040027695

Christianity and the African Counter-Discourse in Achebe and Beti: Cultures in Dialogue, Contest and Conflict intervenes, in light of African literary products, the history of Christianity in Africa in late 19th and early 20th centuries, goes beyond the existing clichés about the operations of the European Christian missionaries whether Protestant or Catholic in Africa, and opens alternative ways to read the chain of missionary-native African, and missionary-European colonists relationships. Christian missionaries did not come to Africa for: their own interests, the Christianization of Africa, European colonial projects, the interests of Africans, the establishment of European civilization in Africa, but came for all. Once, there was a dialogue between the Christian missionaries and pagan Africans which was in time replaced by contest for superiority, and finally by conflict. Accordingly, the countenance of the continent has changed forever.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o

Ngugi wa Thiong’o
Author: Amitayu Chakraborty
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2024-03-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1003854885

As a part of Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literature, the book explores the complex of ways in which Ngugi wa Thiong’o wrestles with issues of nationalism and ethnicity through his politically subversive and creatively intense literary texts. His novels and plays are fraught with his anxiety, resistance, and defiance concerning Gikuyu ethnicity, Kenyan nationalism, and a curious, globalectic imaginary. In this way, the book re- appreciates Ngugi offering scholarly insights into the present debates over identity politics as well as aesthetics that animate contemporary research in postcolonial studies, world literature, and African studies across the globe.

Emotional Transitions in Contemporary Afrodiasporic Women's Writing

Emotional Transitions in Contemporary Afrodiasporic Women's Writing
Author: Ángela Suárez-Rodríguez
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023
Genre: Affect (Psychology) in literature
ISBN: 9781032526706

"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"--

Paradoxes of Postcolonial Culture

Paradoxes of Postcolonial Culture
Author: Sandra Ponzanesi
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2012-02-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0791484513

This innovative contribution to understanding the promise and contradictions of contemporary postcolonial culture applies a wide array of theoretical tools to a large body of literature. The author compares the work of established Indian writers including Bharati Mukherjee, Meena Alexander, Sara Suleri, and Sunetra Gupta to new writings by such Afro-Italian immigrant women as Ermina dell'Oro, Maria Abbebù Viarengo, Ribka Sibhatu, and Sirad Hassan. Sandra Ponzanesi's analysis highlights a set of dissymmetrical relationships that are set in the context of different imperial, linguistic, and market policies. By dealing with issues of representation linked to postcolonial literary genres, to gender and ethnicity questions, and to new cartographies of diaspora, this book imbues the postcolonial debate with a new élan.

African Women Writing Resistance

African Women Writing Resistance
Author: Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2010-08-19
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0299236633

African Women Writing Resistance is the first transnational anthology to focus on women’s strategies of resistance to the challenges they face in Africa today. The anthology brings together personal narratives, testimony, interviews, short stories, poetry, performance scripts, folktales, and lyrics. Thematically organized, it presents women’s writing on such issues as intertribal and interethnic conflicts, the degradation of the environment, polygamy, domestic abuse, the controversial traditional practice of female genital cutting, Sharia law, intergenerational tensions, and emigration and exile. Contributors include internationally recognized authors and activists such as Wangari Maathai and Nawal El Saadawi, as well as a host of vibrant new voices from all over the African continent and from the African diaspora. Interdisciplinary in scope, this collection provides an excellent introduction to contemporary African women’s literature and highlights social issues that are particular to Africa but are also of worldwide concern. It is an essential reference for students of African studies, world literature, anthropology, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and women’s studies. A Choice Outstanding Academic Book Outstanding Book, selected by the Public Library Association Best Books for High Schools, Best Books for Special Interests, and Best Books for Professional Use, selected by the American Association of School Libraries

Transition 113

Transition 113
Author: IU Press Journals
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 189
Release: 2015-02-20
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0253018609

Published three times per year by Indiana University Press for the Hutchins Center at Harvard University, Transition is a unique forum for the freshest, most compelling ideas from and about the black world. Since its founding in Uganda in 1961, the magazine has kept apace of the rapid transformation of the African Diaspora and has remained a leading forum of intellectual debate. In issue 113, Transition updates Countee Cullen's iconic question by asking, "What is Africa to me now?" A soul-searchingly private query, its ramifications nevertheless play out in profoundly public ways, around issues of immigration, racial and ethnic tension, and the search for belonging. Guest edited by Benedicte Ledent and Daria Tunca, in this cluster Madhu Krishnan takes Achebe's Things Fall Apart as a starting point for defining contemporary African literature, while Louis Chude-Sokei explores through their novels the experiences of Africans living in America. Julie Kleinman reveals the perspective of Malian immigrants in France, and photographer Johny Pitts searches Europe with his camera for what he calls "Afropeans." Meanwhile, celebrated author and editor Hilton Als has his own questions about diaspora, which he explores in recollections of a childhood summer in Barbados. Caribbean Canadian novelist David Chariandy also treats Transition readers to a sneak preview of his forthcoming novel, Brother. The issue concludes with a suite of essays that examine the social impacts of collective fear, and ask—given obvious parallels between the Rodney King beating and the murder of Trayvon Martin—why does this keep happening to young black men?