Experimental Subjectivities in Global Black Women's Writing

Race and Narrative Innovation

Sheldon George, Jean Wyatt, Sheldon George, Jean Wyatt

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9781350383470
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350383494
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: African Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In what innovative ways do novels by diasporic Black women writers experiment with the representation of Black subjectivity? This collection explores the inventiveness of contemporary Black women writers – Black British, African, Caribbean, African American – who remake traditional understandings of blackness. As the title word "experimental" signals, these essays foreground the narrative form and stylistic innovations of the black-authored novels they analyze. They also show how these experiments with form mirror the novels' convention-breaking experiments with reimagining Black female subjectivities.

While each novel, of course, represents the complexities of diasporic experiences differently, some issues emerge that are broadly shared not just within a regional group, but across geographical borders. One feature of the collection is a comparative look at such linking themes across borders, under the rubrics: a return to precolonial systems of belief, reinventions of mothering, relational subjectivities, memory, history and haunting, and posthumanist revaluations. These themes take different shapes across the multitude of diverse cultures studied in this book. But together they establish a pan-global imaginative practice.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction: Experimentation and Subjectivity in Global Black Women’s Novels
• 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
• 2 “This One Here Is Not Me”: Decolonizing Female Subjectivities in Paulina Chiziane’s Niketche: Uma história de poligamia
• 3 Zimbabwean Decolonization and Colonial Education: Ubuntu (Hunhu) in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s The Book of Not
• 4 Holding—Shedding: Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Celestine Chukwuemeka Mbaegbu’s Igbo Metaphysics
• Part Two Contemporary African American Women Writers
• 5 Constructing Black Women’s Interiorities in Toni Morrison’s Beloved
• 6 Writing (Against) Abjection in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing
• 7 “Is Your Mother Well?”: Touch and the Racialized Maternal Subject in Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif ” and Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild”
• 8 “Are You Now So Deluded You Think 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
• 9 Desire Beyond the Limits of Sanity: Subjectivity and Psychic Spatiality in Toni Morrison’s Paradise
• Part Three Contemporary Caribbean Women Writers
• 10 Authoring Selfhood: Experiments in Self-Making in Jamaica Kincaid, Dionne Brand and Diana Evans
• 11 From “Half ” to “Half,” or the Question of Being in Alecia McKenzie’s Sweetheart
• 12 Imagining a Past/Future Self: Tan-Tan in Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber
• Part Four Contemporary Black British Women Writers
• 13 Disorienting Subjectivity: Spatial Relations and Yoruba Themes in Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl
• 14 Welcoming Familiars: Memory Work in Bernardine Evaristo’s Fiction
• 15 “An Unexpected Turn”: Coincidence and Community in Aminatta Forna’s Happiness
• Index
• Copyright