Feminism and Modernity in Anglophone African Women’s Writing

Feminism and Modernity in Anglophone African Women’s Writing
Author: Dobrota Pucherová
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2022-07-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000620298

This book re-reads the last 60 years of Anglophone African women’s writing from a transnational and trans-historical feminist perspective, rather than postcolonial, from which these texts have been traditionally interpreted. Such a comparative frame throws into relief patterns across time and space that make it possible to situate this writing as an integral part of women’s literary history. Revisiting this literature in a comparative context with Western women writers since the 18th century, the author highlights how invocations of "tradition" have been used by patriarchy everywhere to subjugate women, the similarities between women’s struggles worldwide, and the feminist imagination it produced. The author argues that in the 21st century, African feminism has undergone a major epistemic shift: from a culturally exclusive to a relational feminism that conceptualizes African femininity through the risky opening of oneself to otherness, transculturation, and translation. Like Western feminists in the 1960s, contemporary African women writers are turning their attention to the female body as the prime site of women’s oppression and freedom, reframing feminism as a demand for universal human rights and actively shaping global discourses on gender, modernity, and democracy. The book will be of interest to students and researchers of African literature, but also feminist literary scholars and comparatists more generally.

Ethics and Human Rights in Anglophone African Women’s Literature

Ethics and Human Rights in Anglophone African Women’s Literature
Author: Chielozona Eze
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2016-12-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319409220

This book proposes feminist empathy as a model of interpretation in the works of contemporary Anglophone African women writers. The African woman’s body is often portrayed as having been disabled by the patriarchal and sexist structures of society. Returning to their bodies as a point of reference, rather than the postcolonial ideology of empire, contemporaryAfrican women writers demand fairness and equality. By showing how this literature deploys imaginative shifts in perspective with women experiencing unfairness, injustice, or oppression because of their gender, Chielozona Eze argues that by considering feminist empathy, discussions open up about how this literature directly addresses the systems that put them in disadvantaged positions. This book, therefore, engages a new ethical and human rights awareness in African literary and cultural discourses, highlighting the openness to reality that is compatible with African multi-ethnic, multi-racial, and increasingly cosmopolitan communities.

The Routledge Handbook of the New African Diasporic Literature

The Routledge Handbook of the New African Diasporic Literature
Author: Lokangaka Losambe
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 591
Release: 2024-05-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1040013988

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.

Literature and the Work of Universality

Literature and the Work of Universality
Author: Alice Duhan
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2024-07-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3111209156

In an age of accelerating ecological crises, global inequalities and democratic fragility, it has become crucial to achieve renewed articulations of human commonality. With anchorage in critical theory as well as world literary studies, this volume approaches literature - and modes of literary thinking - as a key resource for such a task. "Universality" is understood here not as an established "universalism", but as a horizon towards which intellectual inquiry and literary practices orient themselves. In the field of world literature, there is by now a wide repertoire of epistemological resources through which claims to universality can be both questioned and reconfigured. If, at one end of the spectrum, world literature confronts us with the spectre of homogenisation and the commodification of difference under a regime of global capitalism, at another end renewed forms of philological, anthropological and ecological attentiveness to the particulars of languages and texts within the crucible of connected histories allow for defamiliarising perspectives both on received historical narratives and aesthetic practices. Vernacularity emerges here as a central point of reference for constructing the universal from within the particular, the idiomatic, and the experiences of social subordination or complicity.

Coloniality and Migrancy in African Diasporic Literatures

Coloniality and Migrancy in African Diasporic Literatures
Author: Peter Moopi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2023-10-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000968596

This book explores literary representations of African immigrant experiences in Western countries, against the backdrop of colonial stereotypes and recent expressions of anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe and America. The book deploys the concept of coloniality of migrancy to explore how global coloniality continues to shape the identities and lived experiences of African immigrants as represented in African diasporic literatures. It considers the persistence of racist and discriminatory attitudes and patterns of thought that developed during slavery and colonialism, and asks to what extent it is possible for African immigrants to transcend race in their configuration of their identity. Five key twenty-first century African diasporic novels are considered in the analysis: Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers, Dave Eggers’ What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names and Helon Habila’s Travellers. Overall, the book demonstrates that despite the hostility migrants of colour encounter, Africans are shunning the victimhood of colonialism and slavery and finding alternative ways of navigating and inhabiting the modern world. Foregrounding the usefulness of decoloniality and postcolonial theory as theoretical tools, this book will be an invaluable resource to researchers across the fields of African literature, migration, sociology, politics, and decolonial studies.

Modern Anglophone Drama by Women

Modern Anglophone Drama by Women
Author: Alan P. Barr
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 508
Release: 2007
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780820488882

Alan P. Barr has brought together eleven world-class modern plays by women that show not only their artistry but also their variety and their passion. Drawn from nine different countries (other than the United States and England) that use English as their literary language, the plays reflect the concerns of women across the globe. The imagery and dramatic conventions may shift and the tones vary, but the need to be strong (and its difficulty), the sense of a world that is anything but nurturing or ideal, and the suspect nature of family life and relations are constant themes. The struggle over language, in countries that are very often ex-colonies, conveys the frequent overlap between feminist and postcolonial focuses. The diversity of Englishes on stages from Singapore to South Africa is a lovely curtain call to this theater festival.

African Women and Their Networks of Support

African Women and Their Networks of Support
Author: Elene Cloete
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2020-10-29
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1793607400

African Women and their Networks of Support: Intervening Connections is an interdisciplinary analysis of how African women, in their different cultural, social, and political spaces, find innovative strategies to address the challenge they face and voice their often-underrepresented perspectives. These actions are often molded in either formal or informal networks of support that provide women with the necessary peer-based foundation to deal with gender discrimination, violence, and subjugation. On other occasions, women’s strategies toward change are driven by specific individuals who set the transformative agenda and trajectory toward social change. Contributors label these efforts as intervening connections, representing women's intentional actions to circumvent, disrupt, question, and ultimately rearrange structures of gender discrimination. Respective chapters capture networks that are historic and current; real, virtual, and imagined; local and transnational, and managed by women on the continent as well as in the diaspora. Considering these diverse spaces in which networking happens, contributors underscore not only how African women aim at deconstructing current systemic gender inequalities, but also how they are developing futures of gender equity and equality.

Gender and Identity in North Africa

Gender and Identity in North Africa
Author: Abdelkader Cheref
Publisher: I.B. Tauris
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2010-08-30
Genre: History
ISBN:

Charts the rise of postcolonial liter written by women from the Maghreb and provides comparative analysis of three prominent contemporary authors.

Women Writers and Experimental Narratives

Women Writers and Experimental Narratives
Author: Kate Aughterson
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2021-01-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030496511

This book explores the history of women’s engagement with writing experimentally. Women writers have long used different narratives and modes of writing as a way of critiquing worlds and stories that they find themselves at odds with, but at the same time, as a way to participate in such spaces. Experimentation—of style, mode, voice, genre and language—has enabled women writers to be simultaneously creative and critical, engaged in and yet apart from stories and cultures that have so often seen them as ‘other’. This collection shows that women writers in English over the past 400 years have challenged those ideas not only through explicit polemic and alternative representations but through disrupting the very modes of representation and story itself.

African Women Writing Diaspora

African Women Writing Diaspora
Author: Rose A. Sackeyfio
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 147
Release: 2021-04-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1793642443

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.