Experimental Subjectivities in Global Black Women's Writing

Cover
Halftitle page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
Contributors
Introduction: Experimentation and Subjectivity in Global Black Women’s Novels
	Language and Subjectivity
	Close Reading and Cultural Context
	Cultural Context and Experimentation
	African Americans: Responding to the History of Racialized Subjectivity
	Africa: Language and the Expression of Contemporary Subjectivity
	The Caribbean: Decolonizing Strategies for Literature and Language
	Black British Women Writers: Diasporic Inspirations
	Chapter Descriptions
	Thematic Intersections Across Borders
	Conclusion
	Notes
	References
Part One Contemporary African Women Writers: Uganda, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Nigeria
	1 “There Are Things You Don’t Need to Be Told. You Suckle Them at Your Mother’s Teat”: Dynamic Subjectivity, Breastfeeding, and Storycrafting in The First Woman by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
		Marriage and Migration
		Afropolitanism, Postcolonialism, Place
		Storycrafting: “She Is a Story. A Story which Aggravated Our Situation”
		Breastfeeding: “That Charcoally Breast Feeding that Zungu Baby”
		Conclusion
		References
	2“This One Here Is Not Me”: Decolonizing Female Subjectivities in Paulina Chiziane’s Niketche: Uma história de poligamia
		Re-membering the Self
		Redefining Womanhood Through Initiation
		Structural Misogyny and Its Racist Subtext in Postcolonial Mozambique
		Centering Women’s Relationships: Taming Polygamy?
		Community Beyond the Human: The “Vegan Unconscious” in Niketche
		Conclusion
		Notes
		References
	3 Zimbabwean Decolonization and Colonial Education: Ubuntu (Hunhu) in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s The Book of Not
		Fanon and the Colonial Object-World
		Split Narrative Sites
		The Body in an Insurgent Landscape
		Dissociation
		Food and Micro-Aggressions
		Ubuntu and Settler Colonial Education
		Conclusion
		Notes
		References
	4 Holding—Shedding: Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Celestine Chukwuemeka Mbaegbu’s Igbo Metaphysics
		Acknowledgements
		Notes
		References
Part Two Contemporary African American Women Writers
	5 Constructing Black Women’s Interiorities in Toni Morrison’s Beloved
		Baby Suggs: The Matriarch
		Sethe: The Mother
		Denver: The Daughter
		Conclusion
		Notes
		References
	6 Writing (Against) Abjection in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing
		“Inside Out”: The Animal Within5
		“Like a Carcass’s from a Hook”: Straying and Strayed Subject
		Hauntology: “Abjected” Ghosts
		“Fuck the Skin”: Miscegenation, Regurgitation, Keening
		Notes
		References
	7 “Is Your Mother Well?”: Touch and the Racialized Maternal Subject in Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif ” and Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild”
		“Recitatif”
		Notes
		References
	8 “Are You Now So Deluded You Th ink You Exist Outside the Category of Everything?”: A Posthumanist Critical Disability Analysis of Black Motherhood Beyond Cisgenderism in Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts
		Ungendered Black Motherhood
		Animacy, Life, and Autist-lens
		Autistext, Metaphors, and Transfiguring the Black Mother
		Cisgender Performativity
		Notes
		References
	9 Desire Beyond the Limits of Sanity: Subjectivity and Psychic Spatiality in Toni Morrison’s Paradise
		Narrative Space and Fantasies of Paradise
		Consolata’s Homeless Desire
		Connie and the Third World Space of the Split Psyche
		Notes
		References
Part Three Contemporary Caribbean Women Writers
	10 Authoring Selfhood: Experiments in Self-Making in Jamaica Kincaid, Dionne Brand and Diana Evans
		Realism and the Experimental
		“My Biography Is My Books”6
		“Let’s Face It. We’re Undone by Each Other”9
		“You Could Never Pass. You Could Never Be a Real Person”11
		“Someone Like Me, Reading”
		“Do You Ever Feel like That, like You’re Losing Track of Who You Are?”18
		Notes
		References
	11 From “Half” to “Half,” or the Question of Being in Alecia McKenzie’s Sweetheart
		Being Subject, Becoming Self?
		Half and Half, or the Question of Contemporary “Middle Passages”
		Passing the Ashes
		Asymmetry at Work: Location, the Plane and the Hurricane
		The Routes of Story
		Art Trade from Yard: Voice-Text-Image, or Restoring a Collaborative and Creative Milieu
		“Being There and Being Gone”20
		Notes
		References
	12 Imagining a Past/Future Self: Tan-Tan in Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber
		Notes
		References
Part Four Contemporary Black British Women Writers
	13 Disorienting Subjectivity: Spatial Relations and Yoruba Themes in Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl
		A Space of Containment
		Subjectivity, Embodiment, and Spatial Relations
		The Grotesque Body
		Reader Response and Narrative Sequence
		Fern: Yoruba Cultural Beliefs about Twins
		What Happens in the Ending?
		The Bush: Twins and Reincarnation
		Notes
		References
	14 Welcoming Familiars: Memory Work in Bernardine Evaristo’s Fiction
		Lara: Postmemory
		The Emperor’s Babe: Uncanny Familiars
		Girl, Woman, Other: Welcoming Familiars
		Conclusion: Black Women’s Time
		Notes
		References
	15 “An Unexpected Turn”:1 Coincidence and Community in Aminatta Forna’s Happiness
		Introduction
		Coincidence as Connection
		Trauma as Alienation
		Black Subjectivity as Community
		Conclusion
		Note
		References
Index