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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.
Is conflict inherent to the politics of borders? Recent global events, erupting from national, religious, class, racial and gender boundaries would suggest it is. From the inhumanity of post-Brexit British immigration policy to the violent suppression of women's freedom in Iran, to Russia's territorial invasion of Ukraine, and most immediately to the violent conflagration engulfing Palestine, border hostilities seem everywhere characterised by fearful and toxic intolerance of what is deemed other. This book examines the writing of award-winning European novelists to suggest an alternative perspective, one that redresses time-sanctioned hierarchies of mind over body, of ideals over physical reality. It explores novelistic representations of power, war, sacrifice, heroism, national history and identity, all issues more conventionally viewed within a male consensus. The fiction offers a cultural and imaginative response to border conflicts of all kinds, ethical, bodily, religious, and geographical, often drawing upon the writers' own personal experience of threatening divisions. Examining works by Virginia Woolf, Jenny Erpenbeck, Olga Tokarczuk, Herta Müller, Anna Burns, Chika Unigwe, Maylis de Kerangal, Magda Szabó, Elena Ferranti, Alki Zei, Elif Shafak, and Oksana Zabuzhko, it uses an integrated interdisciplinary approach to combine literary readings with detailed historical and political understanding of cultural context. Coming from many different cultures and histories, these writers speak a common condemnation of all hierarchies of worth and of exceptionalist identities whether sanctified by religion, nature, or tradition. Morris shows how their stories, read here in translation, also articulate a strikingly unified vision of a radical ecological understanding of human relations based on physical continuity and co-existence rather than borders dividing an idealised 'us' from a denigrated 'them'.
Offering a thorough introduction to notions of gender in contemporary global literature, Global Literature and Gender uses postcolonial theories alongside theories of space and place, theories of globalization, and reference to the Posthuman and the Anthropocene as competing narratives of the contemporary. This book argues for the ongoing but very current significance of gender as an organizing category, while also revealing the fluidity and boundary defying nature of gender in twenty-first-century literature. Divided into three sections, looking at femininity, masculinity, and transgender, Jenni Ramone: Examines globalization’s uneasy relationship with theories which foreground gender and considers gender as a challenge to globalization; Analyses embodied labour, global travel, trade, and tourism; Discusses the ways in which globalization and masculinity are likewise at odds; Considers a diverse range of themes and genres, including pearl-diving, taxi driving, space travel, authorship, surrogacy, modern-day slavery, Afrofuturism, Objectophilia, Stigma, Dehumanisation, Passing, and romance tourism; Engages with a vast range of innovative contemporary works, including those by Akwaeke Emezi, Alain Mabanckou, Mieko Kawakami, Meera Syal, Helen Heath, Kei Miller, Deji Bryce Olukotun, jaye simpson, Hideki Noda, Dany Laferrière, Zadie Smith, Hanan Al-Shaykh, Teju Cole, Sherley Anne Williams, Helen Oyeyemi, and Arundhati Roy. Global Literature and Gender is an essential intervention for researchers and students of globalization, twenty-first-century literature, and gender.
"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"--
In Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison’s Later Novels, Jean Wyatt explores the interaction among ideas of love, narrative innovation, and reader response in Toni Morrison’s seven later novels. Love comes in a new and surprising shape in each of the later novels; for example, Love presents it as the deep friendship between little girls; in Home it acts as a disruptive force producing deep changes in subjectivity; and in Jazz it becomes something one innovates and recreates each moment—like jazz itself. Each novel’s unconventional idea of love requires a new experimental narrative form. Wyatt analyzes the stylistic and structural innovations of each novel, showing how disturbances in narrative chronology, surprise endings, and gaps mirror the dislocated temporality and distorted emotional responses of the novels’ troubled characters and demand that the reader situate the present-day problems of the characters in relation to a traumatic African American past. The narrative surprises and gaps require the reader to become an active participant in making meaning. And the texts’ complex narrative strategies draw out the reader’s convictions about love, about gender, about race—and then prompt the reader to reexamine them, so that reading becomes an active ethical dialogue between text and reader. Wyatt uses psychoanalytic concepts to analyze Morrison’s narrative structures and how they work on readers. Love and Narrative Form devotes a chapter to each of Morrison’s later novels: Beloved, Jazz, Paradise, Love, A Mercy, Home, and God Help the Child.
Iconic as a novelist and popular cultural figure, Zora Neale Hurston remains underappreciated as an anthropologist. Is it inevitable that Hurston’s literary authority should eclipse her anthropological authority? If not, what socio-cultural and institutional values and processes shape the different ways we read her work? Jennifer L. Freeman Marshall considers the polar receptions to Hurston’s two areas of achievement by examining the critical response to her work across both fields. Drawing on a wide range of readings, Freeman Marshall explores Hurston’s popular appeal as iconography, her elevation into the literary canon, her concurrent marginalization in anthropology despite her significant contributions, and her place within constructions of Black feminist literary traditions. Perceptive and original, Ain’t I an Anthropologist is an overdue reassessment of Zora Neale Hurston’s place in American cultural and intellectual life.
The accomplishments of pioneering doctors such as John Peter Mettauer, James Marion Sims, and Nathan Bozeman are well documented. It is also no secret that these nineteenth-century gynecologists performed experimental caesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistula repairs primarily on poor and powerless women. Medical Bondage breaks new ground by exploring how and why physicians denied these women their full humanity yet valued them as “medical superbodies” highly suited for medical experimentation. In Medical Bondage, Cooper Owens examines a wide range of scientific literature and less formal communications in which gynecologists created and disseminated medical fictions about their patients, such as their belief that black enslaved women could withstand pain better than white “ladies.” Even as they were advancing medicine, these doctors were legitimizing, for decades to come, groundless theories related to whiteness and blackness, men and women, and the inferiority of other races or nationalities. Medical Bondage moves between southern plantations and northern urban centers to reveal how nineteenth-century American ideas about race, health, and status influenced doctor-patient relationships in sites of healing like slave cabins, medical colleges, and hospitals. It also retells the story of black enslaved women and of Irish immigrant women from the perspective of these exploited groups and thus restores for us a picture of their lives.
Women Writing Culture is a collection of six interviews with internationally prominent scholars about feminism, rhetoric, writing, and multiculturalism. Those interviewed include feminist philosopher of science Sandra Harding; cultural critic and philosopher of science Donna Haraway; noted American theorist of women's epistemology Mary Belenky; African-American cultural critic bell hooks; Luce Irigaray, a major exponent of "French Feminism"; and Jean-Francois Lyotard, a philosopher and cultural critic who has helped to define "the postmodern condition." Together, these interviews afford significant insight into these eminent scholars' perspectives on women, writing, and culture, and explore how women write culture through the various postmodern discourses in which they engage.
Traces of a Stream offers a unique scholarly perspective that merges interests in rhetorical and literacy studies, United States social and political theory, and African American women writers. Focusing on elite nineteenth-century African American women who formed a new class of women well positioned to use language with consequence, Royster uses interdisciplinary perspectives (literature, history, feminist studies, African American studies, psychology, art, sociology, economics) to present a well-textured rhetorical analysis of the literate practices of these women. With a shift in educational opportunity after the Civil War, African American women gained access to higher education and received formal training in rhetoric and writing. By the end of the nineteenth-century, significant numbers of African American women operated actively in many public arenas. In her study, Royster acknowledges the persistence of disempowering forces in the lives of African American women and their equal perseverance against these forces. Amid these conditions, Royster views the acquisition of literacy as a dynamic moment for African American women, not only in terms of their use of written language to satisfy their general needs for agency and authority, but also to fulfill socio-political purposes as well. Traces of a Stream is a showcase for nineteenth-century African American women, and particularly elite women, as a group of writers who are currently underrepresented in rhetorical scholarship. Royster has formulated both an analytical theory and an ideological perspective that are useful in gaining a more generative understanding of literate practices as a whole and the practices of African American women in particular. Royster tells a tale of rhetorical prowess, calling for alternative ways of seeing, reading, and rendering scholarship as she seeks to establish a more suitable place for the contributions and achievements of African American women writers.
In The Pursuit of Happiness Bianca C. Williams traces the experiences of African American women as they travel to Jamaica, where they address the perils and disappointments of American racism by looking for intimacy, happiness, and a connection to their racial identities. Through their encounters with Jamaican online communities and their participation in trips organized by Girlfriend Tours International, the women construct notions of racial, sexual, and emotional belonging by forming relationships with Jamaican men and other "girlfriends." These relationships allow the women to exercise agency and find happiness in ways that resist the damaging intersections of racism and patriarchy in the United States. However, while the women require a spiritual and virtual connection to Jamaica in order to live happily in the United States, their notion of happiness relies on travel, which requires leveraging their national privilege as American citizens. Williams's theorization of "emotional transnationalism" and the construction of affect across diasporic distance attends to the connections between race, gender, and affect while highlighting how affective relationships mark nationalized and gendered power differentials within the African diaspora.