Transnationalism and Resistance: Experience and Experiment in Women’s Writing


Book Description

This study presents a unique collection of essays which focus on the relationships among form, aesthetics, and transnational women’s writing produced in recent years. The essays in this volume treat literary works from diverse cultures and geographies, concentrating on the intersections of theory and literature. This results in a wide spectrum of identities and texts – including the work of Swedish poet Aase Berg, the Indian translation market, the Chicana novel, creative non-fiction by Croatian writer Dubravka Ugrešic, and multilingual hybrid texts by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha – in order to provide a framework for an overarching theory of transnationalism as it interacts with newer paradigms of gendered identity and the new forms of literature to which they contribute. Transnationalism and Resistance offers a multifaceted approach to transnational studies and constitutes a cogent analysis of the ways in which women’s writing informs contemporary global literary Production. This volume is of interest for scholars in women’s studies, literature, the social sciences, cultural studies and all other fields that take an interest in writing that addresses contemporary global issues.




Women Writers and Experimental Narratives


Book Description

This book explores the history of women’s engagement with writing experimentally. Women writers have long used different narratives and modes of writing as a way of critiquing worlds and stories that they find themselves at odds with, but at the same time, as a way to participate in such spaces. Experimentation—of style, mode, voice, genre and language—has enabled women writers to be simultaneously creative and critical, engaged in and yet apart from stories and cultures that have so often seen them as ‘other’. This collection shows that women writers in English over the past 400 years have challenged those ideas not only through explicit polemic and alternative representations but through disrupting the very modes of representation and story itself.




British Experimental Women’s Fiction, 1945—1975


Book Description

This book scrutinizes a range of relatively overlooked post-WWII British women writers who sought to demonstrate that narrative prose fiction offered rich possibilities for aesthetic innovation. What unites all the primary authors in this volume is a commitment to challenging the tenets of British mimetic realism as a literary and historical phenomenon. This collection reassesses how British female novelists operated in relation to transnational vanguard networking clusters, debates and tendencies, both political and artistic. The chapters collected in this volume enquire, for example, whether there is something fundamentally different (or politically dissident) about female experimental procedures and perspectives. This book also investigates the processes of canon formation, asking why, in one way or another, these authors have been sidelined or misconstrued by recent scholarship. Ultimately, it seeks to refine a new research archive on mid-century British fiction by female novelists at least as diverse as recent and longer established work in the domain of modernist studies.




African American Arts


Book Description

Trans Identity as Embodied Afrofuturism / Amber Johnson -- "I Luh God" : Erica Campbell, Trap Gospel and the Moral Mask of Language Discrimination / Sammantha McCalla -- The Conciliation Project as a Social Experiment : Behind the Mask of Uncle Tomism and the Performance of Blackness / Jasmine Coles & Tawnya Pettiford-Wates.




Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic Women’s Writing


Book Description

This book sets out to investigate how contemporary African diasporic women writers respond to the imbalances, pressures and crises of twenty-first-century globalization by querying the boundaries between two separate conceptual domains: love and space. The study breaks new ground by systematically bringing together critical love studies with research into the cultures of migration, diaspora and refuge. Examining a notable tendency among current black feminist writers, poets and performers to insist on the affective dimension of world-making, the book ponders strategies of reconfiguring postcolonial discourses. Indeed, the analyses of literary works and intermedia performances by Chimamanda Adichie, Zadie Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, Shailja Patel and Warsan Shire reveal an urge of moving beyond a familiar insistence on processes of alienation or rupture and towards a new, reparative emphasis on connection and intimacy – to imagine possible inhabitable worlds.




Literature of the Somali Diaspora


Book Description

The first study of Anglophone and Italian novels by Somali diasporic authors, offering a new critical framework for multilingual and transnational analysis of Somali literature. Building on the latest scholarship about multilingual contexts, diaspora studies and the rapidly expanding field of Italian postcolonial studies, Marco Medugno examines Somali diasporic literature with a comparative perspective. Considering works written in English and Italian, he argues that Somali diasporic authors share similar themes and aesthetics, thus creating an interliterary community within the diaspora space. By using multilingualism as a starting point, Medugno provides significant insights into how Somali national and individual identities are constructed in diasporic, global contexts through geography, style, form, language and the re-writing of national histories emerging out of colonization and independence. Analysing acclaimed Somali novels such as Nuruddin Farah's Links and Crossbones, Igiaba Scego's Adua and Cristina Ali Farah's Little Mother, he questions any definition of 'local' as 'provincial', instead considering it a site for interrogating global concerns. Literature of the Somali Diaspora is organized around three themes: spatiality, language and resistance help to contextualize authors, forced by the decades-long Somali Civil War, to write outside Somalia and in different languages – including Somali, Italian, English, German, Dutch and Arabic – within global literary circuits. Their work thus creates a literature not confined within national borders but an interliterary global community, a transnational and multilingual space in which they share world aesthetic ideologies, challenge and engage with literary traditions in different languages and show an interplay between diverse cultures.




Geographies of Identity


Book Description

Geographies of Identity: Narrative Forms, Feminist Futures explores identity and American culture through hybrid, prose work by women, and expands the strategies of cultural poetics practices into the study of innovative narrative writing. Informed by Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha, Harryette Mullen, Julia Kristeva, and others, this project further considers feminist identity politics, race, and ethnicity as cultural content in and through poetic and non/narrative forms. The texts reflected on here explore literal and figurative landscapes, linguistic and cultural geographies, sexual borders, and spatial topographies. Ultimately, they offer non-prescriptive models that go beyond expectations for narrative forms, and create textual webs that reflect the diverse realities of multi-ethnic, multi-oriented, multi-linguistic cultural experiences. Readings of Gertrude Stein's A Geographical History of America, Renee Gladman's Juice, Pamela Lu's Pamela: A Novel, Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely, Juliana Spahr's The Transformation, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée, Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera, and Layli Long Soldier's WHEREAS show how alternatively narrative modes of writing can expand access to representation, means of identification, and subjective agency, and point to horizons of possibility for new futures. These texts critique essentializing practices in which subjects are defined by specific identity categories, and offer complicated, contextualized, and historical understandings of identity formation through the textual weaving of form and content.




Geographies of Affect in Contemporary Literature and Visual Culture


Book Description

Opening a dialogue between the literary and filmic works produced in Central Europe and in the Anglophone world, this volume explores the role of affects and emotions such as shame, fascination and withdrawal in contemporary literature and culture.




Critical and Comparative Perspectives on American Studies


Book Description

This volume explores the convergences and divergences of American Studies today, and, more specifically, investigates how this discipline might be approached. Drawing on a wide range of perspectives, the essays brought together here address concerns related to the role and capacity of American Studies in the early 21st century, amidst alarming circumstances of environmental, economic, and educational degradation in a world characterized by a transnational flux of people, money, and cultures. Since its inception in the 1930s, the field of American Studies has been continuously examining its own disciplinary concepts, methodological approaches, and geographic assumptions. This book responds to calls for an open and critical discussion, offering a multifaceted image of the current approaches to American Studies as a complex and rapidly evolving discipline. The authors of the articles included here are academics and junior researchers who share their investigations and perceptions, ranging from linguistics, literature, economic history, Marx’s ideas, social theory, diasporic narratives, memory, trauma, gender issues, and teaching to popular culture-related phenomena and class-passing in ex-Yugoslavia against the background of the American Dream. The diverse and far-ranging representation of texts in this volume reflects the inseparability and confluence of different research interests within the discipline. The book avoids generalization and encourages interdisciplinarity through a number of critical and comparative contributions to this increasingly inclusive field of scholarship, which ensures its relevance in the ongoing debate about the capacity of American Studies to respond to an ever-broadening range of contemporary issues and challenges. Combining theory and practice in their examinations of academic and popular texts and investigations of American and non-American cultural matrices, the articles in this book will be interesting and useful to scholars and students, as well as the general reader.




Indian Writing in English and the Global Literary Market


Book Description

Indian Writing in English and the Global Literary Market delves into the influences and pressures of the marketplace on this genre, which this volume contends has been both gatekeeper as well as a significant force in shaping the production and consumption of this literature.