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This volume of essays examines the forced dispossession caused by the Middle Passage. The book analyzes the texts, religious rites, economic exchanges, dance, and music it elicited, both on the transatlantic journey and on the American continent. The totality of this collection establishes a broad topographical and temporal context for the Passage that extends from the interior of Africa across the Atlantic and to the interior of the Americas, and from the beginning of the Passage to the present day.
In the period between the 1920s and 1940s, a genre emerged in Chinese literature that would reveal crucial contradictions in Chinese culture that still exist today. At a time of intense political conflict, Chinese women began to write autobiography, a genre that focused on personal identity and self-exploration rather than the national, collective identity that the country was championing. When "I" Was Born: Women's Autobiography in Modern China reclaims the voices of these particular writers, voices that have been misinterpreted and overlooked for decades. Tracing women writers as they move from autobiographical fiction, often self-revelatory and personal, to explicit autobiographies that f...
Toni Morrison: Memory and Meaning boasts essays by well-known international scholars focusing on the author’s literary production and including her very latest works—the theatrical production Desdemona and her tenth and latest novel, Home. These original contributions are among the first scholarly analyses of these latest additions to her oeuvre and make the volume a valuable addition to potential readers and teachers eager to understand the position of Desdemona and Home within the wider scope of Morrison’s career. Indeed, in Home, we find a reworking of many of the tropes and themes that run throughout Morrison’s fiction, prompting the editors to organize the essays as they relate ...
An important collection which explores the complex interrelationships between race, gender, and sex as these are conceptualised within contemporary thought.
This Companion presents new essays covering the one hundred and fifty year history of the African American novel.
Makes a persuasive case for a black Atlantic literary renaissance & its impact on modernist studies. These 10 new chapters stretch and challenge current canonical configurations of modernism in two key ways: by considering the centrality of black artists, writers and intellectuals as key actors and core presences in the development of a modernist avant-garde; and by interrogating 'blackness' as an aesthetic and political category at critical moments during the twentieth century. This is the first book-length publication to explore the term 'Afromodernisms' and the first study to address together the cognate fields of modernism and the black Atlantic.
Three contemporary novels of slavery - Margaret Walker's Jubilee (1966), Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose (1986) and Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) - are the central focus of Liberating Narratives. In significantly different ways that reflect their individual and socio-political contexts of origin, these three novels can all be read as critiques of historical representation and as alternative spaces for remembrance - 'sites of memory' - that attempt to shift the conceptual ground on which our knowledge of the past is based.
The Specter and the Speculative: Afterlives and Archives in the African Diaspora engages in a critical conversation about how historical subjects and historical texts within the African Diaspora are re-fashioned, re-animated, and re-articulated, as well as parodied, nostalgized, and defamiliarized, to establish an “afterlife” for African Atlantic identities and narratives. These essays focus on transnational, transdisciplinary, and transhistorical sites of memory and haunting—textual, visual, and embodied performances—in order to examine how these “living” archives circulate and imagine anew the meanings of prior narratives liberated from their original context. Individual essays examine how historical and literary performances—in addition to film, drama, music, dance, and material culture—thus revitalized, transcend and speak across temporal and spatial boundaries not only to reinstate traditional meanings, but also to motivate fresh commentary and critique. Emergent and established scholars representing diverse disciplines and fields of interest specifically engage under explored themes related to afterlives, archives, and haunting.
Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Chapter 1 Temporal Liminality in Toni Morrison's Beloved and A Mercy -- Chapter 2 Posthuman Solidarity in Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose -- Chapter 3 Afrofuturist Aesthetics in the Works of Erykah Badu, Janelle Monáe, and Gayl Jones -- Chapter 4 Posthuman Multiple Consciousness in Octavia E. Butler's Science Fiction -- Chapter Submarine Transversality in Texts by Sheree Renée Thomas and Julie Dash -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index
A reading of the oeuvre of Toni Morrison—fiction, non-fiction, and other—drawing extensively from her many interviews as well as her primary texts, Toni Morrison: A Literary Life, second edition provides an overview of Morrison’s intellectual growth as an artist. Linda Wagner-Martin aligns Morrison's novels with the works of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, assessing her works as among the most innovative, and most significant, worldwide, of the past fifty plus years. The revised edition includes new discussion of God Help the Child, The Origin of Others, and The Source of Self-Regard. These additions present and intensify scholarship on Morrison’s major literary contributions, but also trace her significant role as a public intellectual, bringing to light the consistency of Morrison’s aesthetic and political visions.