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This book examines the representation of figures, memories and images of childhood in selected contemporary diasporic African fiction by Adichie, Abani, Wainaina and Oyeyemi. The book argues that childhood is a key framework for thinking about contemporary African and African Diasporic identities. It argues that through the privileging of childhood memory, alternative conceptions of time emerge in this literature, and which allow African writers to re-imagine what family, ethnicity, nation means within the new spaces of diaspora that a majority of them occupy. The book therefore looks at the connections between childhood, space, time and memory, childhood gender and sexuality, childhoods in contexts of war, as well as migrant childhoods. These dimensions of childhood particularly relate to the return of the memory of Biafra, the figures of child soldiers, memories of growing up in Cold War Africa, queer boyhoods/sonhood as well as experiences of migration within Africa, North America and Europe.
The figure of the migrant has been celebrated by some as an icon of postmodernity, an emblematic figure in a world increasingly characterized by transnationalism, globalization and mass migrations. Král takes issue with this view of the migrant experience through in-depth analyses of writers including Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith and Monica Ali.
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.
Choose ten major contemporary diasporic writers (from Abdulrazak to Zadie), ask ten leading authorities to write about their use of metaphor, and this is the result: a timely reassertion of metaphor's unrivalled capacity to encompass sameness and difference and create understanding and empathy across boundaries of nationality, race and ethnicity.
The theoretical innovations of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, James Clifford and others have in recent years vitalized postcolonial and diaspora studies, challenging ways in which we understand ‘culture’ and developing new ways of thinking beyond the confines of the nation state. The articles in this volume look at recent developments in diasporic literature and theory, alluding to the work of seminal diaspora theoreticians, but also interrogating such thinkers in the light of recent cultural production (including literature, film and visual art) as well as recent world events. The articles are organized in pairs, offering alternative perspectives on crucial aspects of diaspora theory today: Celebration or Melancholy?; Gender Biases and the Canon of Diasporic Literature; Diasporas of Violence and Terror; Time, Place and Diasporic “Home”; and Border Crossings. A number of the articles are illustrated by discussions of particular authors, such as Caryl Phillips, Salman Rushdie, and Michael Ondaatje, and the range of reference found in this volume covers writing from many parts of the world including contemporary Chicana visual art, Asian diaspora writers, and Black British, Afro-Caribbean, Native North American, and African writing.
This innovative volume discusses the significance of home and global mobility in contemporary diasporic fiction written in English. Through analyses of central diasporic and migrant writers in the United Kingdom and the United States, the timely volume exposes the importance of home and its reconstruction in diasporic literature in the era of globalization and increasing transnational mobility. Through wide-ranging case studies dealing with a variety of black British and ethnic American writers, Home, Identity, and Mobility in Contemporary Diasporic Fiction shows how new identities and homes are constructed in the migrants' new homelands. The volume examines how diasporic novels inscribe hybridity and multiplicity in formerly uniform spaces and subvert traditional understandings of nation, citizenship, and history. Particular emphasis is on the ways in which diasporic fictions appropriate and transform traditional literary genres such as the Bildungsroman and the picaresque to explore the questions of migration and transformation. The authors discussed include Caryl Phillips, Jamal Mahjoub, Mike Phillips, Hari Kunzru, Kamila Shamsie, Benjamin Zephaniah, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Cynthia Kadohata, Ana Castillo, Diana Abu-Jaber, and Bharati Mukherjee. The volume is of particular interest to all scholars and students of post-colonial and ethnic literatures in English.
This book is the first comparative analysis of a new generation of diasporic Anglophone South Asian women novelists including Kiran Desai, Tahmima Anam, Monica Ali, Kamila Shamsie and Jhumpa Lahiri from a feminist perspective. It charts the significant changes these writers have produced in postcolonial and contemporary women’s fiction since the late 1990s. Paying careful attention to the authors’ distinct subcontinental backgrounds of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka – as well as India - this study destabilises the central place given to fiction focused on India. It broadens the customary focus on diasporic writers’ metropolitan contexts, illuminates how these transnational, female-authored literary texts challenge national assumptions and considers the ways in which this new configuration of transnational, feminist writers produces a postcolonial feminist discourse, which differs from Anglo-American feminism.
Over the century that has passed since the start of the massive post-revolutionary exodus, Russian literature has thrived in multiple locations around the globe. What happens to cultural vocabularies, politics of identity, literary canon and language when writers transcend the metropolitan and national boundaries and begin to negotiate new experience gained in the process of migration? Redefining Russian Literary Diaspora, 1920-2020 sets a new agenda for the study of Russian diaspora writing, countering its conventional reception as a subsidiary branch of national literature and reorienting the field from an excessive emphasis on the homeland and origins to an analysis of transnational circulations that shape extraterritorial cultural practices. Integrating a variety of conceptual perspectives, ranging from diaspora and postcolonial studies to the theories of translation and self-translation, World Literature and evolutionary literary criticism, the contributors argue for a distinct nature of diasporic literary expression predicated on hybridity, ambivalence and a sense of multiple belonging. As the complementary case studies demonstrate, diaspora narratives consistently recode historical memory, contest the mainstream discourses of Russianness, rewrite received cultural tropes and explore topics that have remained marginal or taboo in the homeland. These diverse discussions are framed by a focused examination of diaspora as a methodological perspective and its relevance for the modern human condition.
South Asian diasporas can be considered transcultural legacies of colonialism, while constituting transcultural forms of postcolonial reality in today’s globalised world. The main focus of investigation here is South Asian women’s fiction, where diverse forms of identity negotiation undertaken by the protagonists in a number of contemporary novels (from the 1990s to the early 2000s) are read as transgressions. The themes of early gendered experiences of South Asian indentured labour migration, female genealogies and transmissions of cultural heritages down female lines, as well as negotiations of patriarchal violence, are read using a framework culled from postcolonial and feminist criticism. The literary representations of South Asian diasporic female experience in these texts are forms of commentary and critique by contemporary South Asian diasporic women writers. Hence these novels can be viewed as feminist strategies of textual creativity with distinct political aims of presenting transformative narratives addressing the tensions of diaspora and patriarchy. This book is intended to contribute to the current spectrum of academic work being done in diaspora studies, in that it brings together the concepts of diaspora, transculturality, contemporary women’s writing and transnational feminist critical approaches to bear on South Asian women’s diasporic literature. Contrary to the celebratory notion of the concept in much theory, transculturality, as represented in these texts, is fraught with ambivalence.
South Asian Diasporic Writing—poetry, fiction literary theory, and drama by writers from India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka now living in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the USA—is one of the most vibrant areas of contemporary world literature. In this volume, twelve acclaimed writers from this tradition are interviewed by experts in the field about their political, thematic, and personal concerns as well as their working methods and the publishing scene. The book also includes an authoritative introduction to the field, and essays on each writer and interviewer. The interviewers and interviewees are: Alexandra Watkins, Michelle de Kretser, Homi Bhabha, Klaus Stierstorfer, Amit Chaudhuri, Pavan Malreddy, Rukhsana Ahmad, Maryam Mirza, Shankari Chandran, Birte Heidemann, Neel Mukherjee, Anjali Joseph, Chris Ringrose, Michelle Cahill, Rajith Savanadasa, Mariam Pirbhai, Maryam Mirza, Mridula Koshy, Sehba Sarwar, Dr Angela Savage, Sulari Gentill.