Trances, Dances and Vociferations

Trances, Dances and Vociferations
Author: Nada Elia
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2002-09-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1135576327

Trances, Dances and Vociferations provides a compelling feminist analysis of gender politics in the works of four major Africana women writers: Toni Morrison, Michelle Cliff, Assia Djebar, and Paule Marshall. Nada Elia explores the way in which black women characters use conjuring, double entendre, and song to empower, liberate and determine their own female insurgency. She also explains how African and Afrodiasporic women have been forced to rewrite history and substitute a communal and individual wholeness for alienation and separation in many different settings, from Algeria to Oklahoma. Ranging over works including Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow, Djebar's A Sister to Scheherazade, Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven and Morrison's Jazz and Beloved, Elia offers essential and provocative insights into the works of some of our most influential Africana women authors today.

Algerian Imprints

Algerian Imprints
Author: Brigitte Weltman-Aron
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2015-08-18
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0231539878

Born and raised in French Algeria, Assia Djebar and Hélène Cixous represent in their literary works signs of conflict and enmity, drawing on discordant histories so as to reappraise the political on the very basis of dissensus. In a rare comparison of these authors' writings, Algerian Imprints shows how Cixous and Djebar consistently reclaim for ethical and political purposes the demarcations and dislocations emphasized in their fictions. Their works affirm the chance for thinking afforded by marginalization and exclusion and delineate political ways of preserving a space for difference informed by expropriation and nonbelonging. Cixous's inquiry is steeped in her formative encounter with the grudging integration of the Jews in French Algeria, while Djebar's narratives concern the colonial separation of "French" and "Arab," self and other. Yet both authors elaborate strategies to address inequality and injustice without resorting to tropes of victimization, challenging and transforming the understanding of the history and legacy of colonized space.

Rituals of Memory in Contemporary Arab Women’s Writing

Rituals of Memory in Contemporary Arab Women’s Writing
Author: Brinda Mehta
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2007-04-26
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9780815631354

This volume carefully assesses fixed notions of Arab womanhood by exploring the complexities of Arab women’s lives as portrayed in literature. Encompassing women writers and critics from Arab, French, and English traditions, it forges a transnational Arab feminist consciousness. Brinda Mehta examines the significance of memory rituals in women’s writings, such as the importance of water and purification rites in Islam and how these play out in the women’s space of the hammam (Turkish bath). Mehta shows how sensory experiences connect Arab women to their past. Specific chapters raise awareness of the experiences of Palestinian women in exile and under occupation, Bedouin and desert rituals, and women’s views on conflict in Iraq and Lebanon, and the compatibility between Islam and feminism. At once provocative and enlightening, this work is a groundbreaking addition to the timely field of modern Arab women’s writing and criticism and Arab literary studies.

Arabic Literature for the Classroom

Arabic Literature for the Classroom
Author: Mushin al-Musawi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2017-04-21
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1315451646

This book presents theoretical and methodical cultural concerns in teaching literatures from non-American cultures along with issues of cross-cultural communication, cultural competency and translation. Covering topics such as the 1001 Nights, Maqamat, Arabic poetry, women’s writing, classical poetics, issues of gender, race, and class, North African concerns, language acquisition through literature, Arab-spring writing, women’s correspondence, issues connected with the so called nahdah (revival) movement in the 19th century and many others, the book provides perspectives and topics that serve in both the planning of new courses and accommodation to already existing programs.

The Cambridge Companion to African American Women's Literature

The Cambridge Companion to African American Women's Literature
Author: Angelyn Mitchell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2009-04-30
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0521858887

The Cambridge Companion to African American Women's Literature covers a period dating back to the eighteenth century. These specially commissioned essays highlight the artistry, complexity and diversity of a literary tradition that ranges from Lucy Terry to Toni Morrison. A wide range of topics are addressed, from the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement, and from the performing arts to popular fiction. Together, the essays provide an invaluable guide to a rich, complex tradition of women writers in conversation with each other as they critique American society and influence American letters. Accessible and vibrant, with the needs of undergraduate students in mind, this Companion will be of great interest to anybody who wishes to gain a deeper understanding of this important and vital area of American literature.

Womanhood in Anglophone Literary Culture

Womanhood in Anglophone Literary Culture
Author: Robin Hammerman
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2009-03-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1443809195

Taken together, the fourteen essays in this collection contribute to the discourse of social conditions for literary women. The essays examine relevant social, intellectual, and professional questions about the ways in which women writers contributed to conceptions of womanhood in nineteenth and twentieth century Anglophone literary culture. Contributors to this collection describe and examine several nineteenth and twentieth century women writers’ responses to patriarchal assumptions about literary merit in genres including poetry and fiction. Womanhood in Anglophone Literary Culture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Perspectives will be of special interest to students and faculty of women’s studies and literature written in the English language.

Resisting Paradise

Resisting Paradise
Author: Angelique V. Nixon
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2015-09-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 1626745994

Winner of the Caribbean Studies Association's 2016 Barbara T. Christian Award for Best Book in the Humanities Tourists flock to the Caribbean for its beaches and spread more than just blankets and dollars. Indeed, tourism has overly affected the culture there. Resisting Paradise explores the import of both tourism and diaspora in shaping Caribbean identity. It examines Caribbean writers and others who confront the region's overdependence on the tourist industry and the many ways that tourism continues the legacy of colonialism. Angelique V. Nixon interrogates the relationship between culture and sex within the production of “paradise” and investigates the ways in which Caribbean writers, artists, and activists respond to and powerfully resist this production. Forms of resistance include critiquing exploitation, challenging dominant historical narratives, exposing tourism's influence on cultural and sexual identity in the Caribbean and its diaspora, and offering alternative models of tourism and travel. Resisting Paradise places emphasis on the Caribbean people and its diasporic subjects as travelers and as cultural workers contributing to alternate and defiant understandings of tourism in the region. Through a unique multidisciplinary approach to comparative literary analysis, interviews, and participant observation, Nixon analyzes the ways Caribbean cultural producers are taking control of representation. While focused mainly on the Anglophone Caribbean, the study covers a range of territories including Antigua, the Bahamas, Grenada, Haiti, Jamaica, as well as Trinidad and Tobago, to deliver a potent critique.

African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade

African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade
Author: Anne Caroline Bailey
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2005
Genre: Anlo (African people)
ISBN: 9780807055120

It's an awful story. It's an awful story. Why do you want to bring this up now'--Chief Awusa of Atorkor For centuries, the story of the Atlantic slave trade has been filtered through the eyes and records of white Europeans. In this watershed book, historian Anne C. Bailey focuses on memories of the trade from the African perspective. African chiefs and other elders in an area of southeastern Ghana-once famously called "the Old Slave Coast"--Share stories that reveal that Africans were traders as well as victims of the trade. Bailey argues that, like victims of trauma, many African societies now experience a fragmented view of their past that partially explains the blanket of silence and shame around the slave trade. Capturing scores of oral histories that were handed down through generations, Bailey finds that, although Africans were not equal partners with Europeans, even their partial involvement in the slave trade had devastating consequences on their history and identity. In this unprecedented and revelatory book, Bailey explores the delicate and fragmented nature of historical memory. From the Trade Paperback edition

Close Kin and Distant Relatives

Close Kin and Distant Relatives
Author: Susana M. Morris
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2014-02-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813935512

The "black family" in the United States and the Caribbean often holds contradictory and competing meanings in public discourse: on the one hand, it is a site of love, strength, and support; on the other hand, it is a site of pathology, brokenness, and dysfunction that has frequently called forth an emphasis on conventional respectability if stability and social approval are to be achieved. Looking at the ways in which contemporary African American and black Caribbean women writers conceptualize the black family, Susana Morris finds a discernible tradition that challenges the politics of respectability by arguing that it obfuscates the problematic nature of conventional understandings of family and has damaging effects as a survival strategy for blacks. The author draws on African American studies, black feminist theory, cultural studies, and women’s studies to examine the work of Paule Marshall, Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat, and Sapphire, showing how their novels engage the connection between respectability and ambivalence. These writers advocate instead for a transgressive understanding of affinity and propose an ethic of community support and accountability that calls for mutual affection, affirmation, loyalty, and respect. At the core of these transgressive family systems, Morris reveals, is a connection to African diasporic cultural rites such as dance, storytelling, and music that help the fictional characters to establish familial connections.

African American Women Writers' Historical Fiction

African American Women Writers' Historical Fiction
Author: A. Nunes
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 464
Release: 2011-05-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230118852

This volume explores African American historical fiction written by women in the last four decades of the twentieth century. Nunes' approach to the texts aims at emphasizing the narrative and thematic achievements of individual novels set in the context of the main trends and developments of the contemporary African American historical novel.