African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
196 p., Argues that cultural and literary expressions of illness, suffering, and subjectivity in the postcolonial context are always in dialogue with seemingly external discourses and practices of health. Thus, through sustained analyses of historical, biomedical and sociocultural currents in the context of eight Francophone novels from 1968 to 2003, the book advances a new theory of critical conditions. These critical conditions represent the conjunction of bodily, psychic, and textual states that defy conventional definitions of health and well-being.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
196 p., Focuses on Francophone women writers who offer striking commentaries on the experience of illness and/or disability and its attendant discourses: Haitian writer Marie Chauvet; Guadeloupian-Senegalese writer Myriam Warner-Vieyra; Guadeloupian writer Maryse Condé; Senegalese writers Ken Bugul, Fama Diagne Sène, and Fatou Diome; and Swiss-Gabonese writer Bessora.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
196 p., Argues that cultural and literary expressions of illness, suffering, and subjectivity in the postcolonial context are always in dialogue with seemingly external discourses and practices of health.
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.
210 p., In African and Caribbean literature the question of power relations is omnipresent. It is identifiable in the literature of the independence period, which explored socio-cultural issues while African and Caribbean nations were emerging from the grip of colonial powers, and also in that of today, where developed countries and developing countries are still negotiating their relationship. While the Black woman is the first to feel the effects of power, because the latter is doubly marginalized as a woman and black, she has historically been silenced by a literary canon that does not leave her room for self-expression. Through an analysis of power relations between Black women and the patriarchal institution, we reveal the tactics that women use to endure the alienating systems in which they are located: (1) the rehabilitation of their sexuality (2) feminine solidarity (3) formal education (4) supernatural power and (5) the reexamination of Western values.
232 p., Calls attention to the renewed popularity of the epistolary novel among Africana contemporary women writers. This work investigates why, since the late nineteen-seventies, there has been a resurgence of this classic form among women writers across the Black Atlantic. The adoption of this genre among women writers in post-colonial contexts is especially significant because the classic epistolary novel was a medium that often endorsed notions of female submission and imperialist ambition. At the same time, the epistolary tradition connotes a revolutionary history. With this idea in mind, the author argues that an examination of how contemporary women revise the epistolary novel offers a crucial perspective regarding the struggles of women throughout various geographic locations and social strata in relation to nation, citizenship, and selfhood. This project focuses on how Sindiwe Magona, Nozipo Maraire, and Paulette Ramsay "reinvent epistolarity," using the epistolary genre to make interventions in the public sphere by depicting Africana women's experiences of education, marriage, inheritance, and health.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
111 p, Examines the ways Guadeloupean women writers Maryse Conde, Simone Schwarz-Bart and Myriam Warner-Vieyra demystify the theme of the return to Africa as opposed to the masculinist version by Negritude male writers from the 1930s to 1960s. Negritude, a cultural and literary movement, drew much of its strength from the idea of a mythical or cultural reconnection with the African past allegorized as a mother figure. In contrast these women writers, of the post-colonial era who are to large extent heirs of Negritude, differ sharply from their male counterparts in their representation of Africa. In their novels, the continent is not represented as a propitious mother figure but a disappointing father figure.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
187 p., Traces the development of the writer’s Afrocentric vision showing how Marshall’s creative sensibility has evolved—from American to African-American, African-Caribbean, and, finally, Pan-African—and how her distinctive literary style combines Western forms with elements from the African oral tradition.
239 p., Undertakes a critical task of "writing to" and "writing back to" Frantz Fanon on the issues of violence, masculinity, and nation-formation. The author deploys Brian Keith Axel's formulations of "national interruption" to position African diasporic women's novels--specifically Gayl Jones's Corregidora, Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, and Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory --as critical interruptions to Fanon's formulations.
