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Rewriting The Return to Africa: Voices of Francophone Caribbean Women Writers examines the ways Guadeloupean women writers Maryse Condé, Simone Schwarz-Bart and Myriam Warner-Vieyra demystify the theme of the return to Africa as opposed to the masculinist version by Négritude male writers from the 1930s to 1960s. Négritude, a cultural and literary movement, drew much of its strength from the idea of a mythical or cultural reconnection with the African past allegorized as a mother figure. In contrast these women writers, of the post-colonial era who are to large extent heirs of Négritude, differ sharply from their male counterparts in their representation of Africa. In their novels, the continent is not represented as a propitious mother figure but a disappointing father figure. This study argues that these women writers' subversion of the metaphorical figure of Africa and its transformation is tied to their gender. The women novelists are indeed critical of a female allegorization of the land that is reminiscent of a colonial or nationalist project and a simplistic representation of motherhood that does not reflect the complexities of the Diaspora's relation to origins and identity. Unlike the primary male writers of the Négritude movement, they carefully "gendered" the notion of return by choosing female protagonists who made their way back to the Motherland in search of identity. I argue that writing is a more suitable space for the female subject seeking identity because it allows her to have a voice and become subject rather than object as that was the case with the Négritude writers. The women writers' shattering of the image of Mother Africa and subsequently that of Father Africa highlights the complex relationship between Africa and the Diaspora from a female point of view. It shifts the identity quest of the characters towards the Caribbean, which emerges as the real problematic mother: a multi-faceted, fragmented figure that reflects the constitutive clash that occurred in the archipelago between Europe, Africa, and the Americas where the issues of race, gender, class, culture, ethnicity, history, and language are very complex.
Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History connects the black literary archive in South Africa to international postcolonial studies via the theory of transculturation, a position adapted from the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz.
Rewriting The Return to Africa: Voices of Francophone Caribbean Women Writers examines the ways Guadeloupean women writers Maryse Condé, Simone Schwarz-Bart and Myriam Warner-Vieyra demystify the theme of the return to Africa as opposed to the its masculinist version by Négritude male writers from the 1930s to 1960s. Négritude, a cultural and literary movement, drew much of its strength from the idea of a mythical or cultural reconnection with the African past allegorized as a mother figure. In contrast these women writers, of the post-colonial era who are to large extent heirs of Négritude, differ sharply from their male counterparts in their representation of Africa. In their novels, the continent is not represented as a propitious mother figure but a disappointing father figure. This study argues that these women writers' subversion of the metaphorical figure of Africa and its transformation is tied to their gender. The women novelists are indeed critical of a female allegorization of the land that is reminiscent of a colonial or nationalist project and a simplistic representation of motherhood that does not reflect the complexities of the Diaspora's relation to origins and identity. Unlike the primary male writers of the Négritude movement, theycarefully "gendered" the notion of return by choosing female protagonists who made their way back to the Motherland in search of identity. I argue that writing is a more suitable space for the female subject seeking identity because it allows her to havea voice and become subject rather than object as that was the case with the Négritude writers. The women writers' shattering of the image of Mother Africa and subsequently that of Father Africa highlights the complex relationship between Africa and the Diaspora from a female point of view. It shifts the identity quest of the characters towards the Caribbean, which emerges as the real problematic mother: a multi-faceted, fragmented figure that reflects the constitutive clash that occurred in the archipelago between Europe, Africa, and the Americas where the issues of race, gender, class, culture, ethnicity, history, and language are very complex.
This volume considers the African Diaspora through the underexplored Afro-Latino experience in the Caribbean and South America. Utilizing both established and emerging approaches such as feminism and Atlantic studies, the authors explore the production of historical and contemporary identities and cultural practices within and beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. Rewriting the African Diaspora in the Caribbean and Latin America illustrates how far the fields of Afro-Latino and African Diaspora studies have advanced beyond the Herskovits and Frazier debates of the 1940s. The book’s arguments complicate Herskovits’ insistence on Black culture being an exclusive reflection of African survivals, as well as Frazier’s counter-claim of African American culture being a result of slavery and colonialism. This collection of thought-provoking essays extends the concepts of diaspora and transnationalism, forcing the reader to reassess their present limitations as interpretive tools. In the process, Afro-Latinos are rendered visible as national actors and transnational citizens. This book was originally published as a special issue of African and Black Diaspora.
This volume brings together scholars working in different languages—Creole, French, English, Spanish—and modes of cultural production—literature, art, film, music—to suggest how best to model courses that impart the rich, vibrant, and multivalent aspects of the Caribbean in the classroom. Essays focus on discussing how best to cross languages, histories, and modes of discourse. Instead of relying on available paradigms that depend on Western ways of thinking, the essays recommend methods to develop a pan-Caribbean perspective in relation to notions of the self, uses of language, gender hierarchies, and ideas of nationhood. Contributors represent various disciplines, work in one of the several languages of the Caribbean, and offer essays that reflect different cadres of expertise.
Colonialism advanced its project of territorial expansion by changing the very meaning of borders and space. The colonial project scripted a unipolar spatial discourse that saw the colonies as an extension of European borders. In his monograph, Mohit Chandna engages with narrations of spatial conflicts in French and Francophone literature and film from the nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. In literary works by Jules Verne, Ananda Devi, and Patrick Chamoiseau, and film by Michael Haneke, Chandna analyzes the depiction of ever-changing borders and spatial grammar within the colonial project. In so doing, he also examines the ongoing resistance to the spatial legacies of colonial practices that act as omnipresent enforcers of colonial borders. Literature and film become sites that register colonial spatial paradigms and advance competing narratives that fracture the dominance of these borders. Through its analyses Spatial Boundaries, Abounding Spaces shows that colonialism is not a finished project relegated to our past. Colonialism is present in the here and now, and exercises its power through the borders that define us.
African Women Writing Diaspora: Transnational Perspectives in the Twenty-First Century examines contemporary fiction by African women authors to resonate diaspora perspectives on what it means to be African within transnational spaces. Through a critical lens, the collection interrogates the ways in which women construct new ways of telling the African story in the global age of social, economic, and political transformation. African Women Writing Diaspora illustrates that for African women, life in the diaspora is an uncharted journey across new landscapes of identity beyond Africa’s borders as a unifying theme. The fictional works analyzed represent the leading women writers who dominate the African literary canon, and the contributors explore diverse themes of immigrant life, racialized identities, and otherness within transnational spaces of the west.
For writers and academics prominent in the field of the New Literatures in English today, the notion of return explodes into rich semantic difference to reveal the diversity of preoccupations underlying the use of the common tongue. From the Caribbean to Australia, Guyana to South Africa, India to Great Britain, literary, political and personal history collaborate in the poetic metamorphosis of an otherwise everyday experience. Now a state of being, now a reading rich with cross-cultural age, return draws from the collective memory, invokes revenants, digs up forgotten history, quests for roots. Just as it creates a dialogue with the past, textual or real, it negotiates turning points and perpetuates reversals. It reclaims territory, tradition and language in its yearning for home. Fraught with the tensions arising from awareness of the impossibility of return, from the exhilarations of imaginary, fictional return - even from the glimmering hope of a possible return - its contemplation can also lead to appreciation of the infinite re-turn, re-newal and re-creation that is the beauty of human experience. Discussion ranges from revenant supernaturalism in West Indian literature and the exploration of return in Australian, African and Indo-Anglian fiction to Caribbean poetry, South African praise poets, and West African drama. Writers treated include Ama Ata Aidoo, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Jean D'Costa, Bessie Head, Matsemela Manaka, Salman Rushdie, Derek Walcott, and Patrick White. The personal, biographical dimension of physical return is encompassed via the examination of the life and works of such writers as Es'kia Mphahlele and Wole Soyinka, and through autobiographical reflections. The essays, stories and poetry in this collection challenge patterns of conditioned reading and call for a multilayered polylogue with reality.
Dot Bekker was born and raised in Bulawayo in the south-west of Zimbabwe. After thirty-eight years away ¬- twenty of those in Europe - she decided to return to the country of her birth; however rather than hop on a plane, Dot chose to drive there: all by herself at the age of sixty, in a twenty-year-old 2WD Ford Transit van that she converted into her home. Dot spent eight and a half months covering 20,000km of some of the toughest overlanding routes in the world, through West and Central Africa. This is her story.Follow Dot's extraordinary 20,000km adventure in her first book, Going Home to Africa, where she describes the ups and downs she faced over the course of her grand expedition: the countries, the people, insane traffic, corrupt borders, marriage proposals, perilous potholes and good old Africa Roadside Assistance.Her fascinating journal also highlights the varied landscapes and cultural history of Africa that she discovered along the way, the strange, funny and sometimes terrifying situations that she encountered, and the numerous challenges that she and BlueBelle endured - all the while navigating her own personal internal journey.At the time of writing Dot still lives in and travels with BlueBelle whenever possible and can be seen out and about meeting people and making things happen in her beloved Zimbabwe. Since her return to Bulawayo, Dot has been tirelessly seeking ways to improve the future for rural communities in Zimbabwe. Her twenty years of business coaching experience is helping to enhance their traditional lifestyle with 21st Century technology in order to actively encourage sustainable development. Another of her passions is giving vulnerable and disadvantaged girls access to education, to which end she created the non-profit organisation, Kusasa. She very much believes that making progress in the gender equality/equity agenda through education is vital for her country.She is also already working on the sequel to Going Home in Africa, which will detail the experience of returning to her homeland and the many joys and challenges she has faced since her return, it will be titled Being Home in Africa.Alongside all this, she has also decided to encourage more women to visit Africa and will be running small women-only group tours from 2022 in Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa. Watch her Facebook page for details of Going Home to Africa Tours.To find out about Dot's journey as it continues, look at @goinghometoafrica on Facebook and Instagram or on the website www.goinghometoafrica.com for blogs and updates. To find out about the girls' education fund, look at @kusasa.africa on Facebook and Instagram or on the website www.kusasa.africa.