Reframing the Black Atlantic

African, Diasporic, Queer and Feminist Perspectives

Aretha Phiri

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9781032752440
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040104248
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

Commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of Paul Gilroy's seminal text, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, this book offers fresh interpretations of established black Atlantic scholarship from the perspective of those typically elided from its ideological purview and existential narrative. The application of queer and/or feminist lenses in each essay attempts to mediate these elisions and to advance potentially transformative, democratising readings of the black Atlantic from both complex and complicating African and diasporic viewpoints. With the aim of realigning black Atlantic scholarship in this way, the edited volume proposes an interventionist approach that is concerned with problematizing ethnic/ cultural universalisms and challenging geographic and gendered hierarchizations. Underlining the importance of aesthetic and creative cultural archives, Reframing the Black Atlantic's focus on transnational African diasporic literature and other intersecting popular cultural forms probes the (imaginative) limits and possibilities of the black Atlantic, conventionally conceived. To this end, this book intends not just to complicate and enhance established views of black Africa; inviting the reader to locate and perceive black life lived otherwise, it points towards more inclusive and expansive global understandings and visions of blackness.

This volume will be of particular use to researchers and students in the fields of race/gender, diaspora/transnational, literary and cultural studies. The chapters of this book were originally published in Cultural Studies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Reframing the Black Atlantic
• 1 The ruse of impurity: Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic and the politics of hybridity
• 2 ‘It was a departure of sorts’: Glocal homes in recent short fiction by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Efemia Chela, Chibundu Onuzo and Lesley Nneka Arimah
• 3 Feeling against the plot: An African diaspora feminist politics of happiness
• 4 How black is African Noir?: Defining blackness through crime fiction
• 5 Queering the black Atlantic: Transgender spaces in Akwaeke Emezi’s writing and visual art
• 6 Oceanic bellies and liquid feminism in Fatou Diome’s Le Ventre de l’Atlantique
• 7 Migrating narratives: Re-inscribing black diaspora cultures
• 8 Interview: ‘The elephant in the room’: Talking (physics of) blackness with Michelle M. Wright
• Afterword: Engendering new century black transnationalisms
• Index