320 p., Examines the place of difference in black women's writing of the African diaspora. The works of well-known and canonical writers Toni Morrison, Buchi Emecheta, Jamaica Kincaid, and Audre Lorde illustrate key functions of the poetics of difference. The author reads these writers alongside important but underexplored figures, including Ghanaian-born poet Ama Ata Aidoo, Cuban-born novelist Achy Obejas, Trinidadian-born writer Dionne Brand, and South African/Botswanan writer Bessie Head, as well as younger writers such as U.S.-born playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, Nigerian-born fiction writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and St. Thomas-born writer Tiphanie Yanique. These writers reframe identity around radical models of difference by: (1) developing and naming hybrid genres; and (2) destabilizing formal conventions of recognizable genres through multiplicities of voice. By highlighting difference as a core component of black female identity, these writers make crucial interventions in several areas, including Afrodiasporic cultural, feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories of identity, as well as feminist, Afrodiasporic cultural, formalist, and narratological conceptions of voice.
370 p., Examines three general geographical areas in which people who originated in Africa were dispersed to the West during the Transatlantic Trade in Captured Africans. In Africa there was a process of inculcating cultural values while harnessing skills in an authentic education system called retreat schools. These schools were the original African lodges or secret societies that supported the communal system since they made people indigenous. Everyone in a village had an obligation to become initiated in order to learn the secrets of their society. Those individuals who were not indoctrinated were ostracized because they did not experience transformation and pledged an oath of loyalty. The purpose of this study is to investigate the elaborate infrastructure that was historically an integral part of early African institutional character, and aspects of its presentation among New World Africans.
