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This book approaches the study of AfroEurope through narrative forms produced in contemporary France, a location which richly illustrates race in European spaces. The book adopts a transdisciplinary lens that combines critical black and urban geographies, intersectional feminism, and textual analysis to explore the spatial negotiations of black women in France. It assesses literature, film, and music as narrative forms and engages with the sociocultural and political contexts from which they emerge. Through the figure of the black flâneuse and the analytical framework of "walking as method", the book goes beneath spectacular representations of ghettoised banlieues, televised protests, and s...
This volume addresses questions at the intersections of cinematic form and the African city. It examines the contribution of cinema and audiovisual media to our understanding and experience of contemporary cities from an African perspective. “Reading” the African city as form, this volume problematizes the circulation of terms such as “Afropolitanism,” “Afro-polis”, “Afro-modernity” and “Afro-urbanity”, which often define the kinds of sentiments invested in or associated with the African city. Situated within an interdisciplinary matrix that reads the urban African cinematic form through affect theory and the city as a matrix of feeling, critical black geography and the r...
Commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of Paul Gilroy’s seminal text, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, this book offers fresh interpretations of established black Atlantic scholarship from the perspective of those typically elided from its ideological purview and existential narrative. The application of queer and/or feminist lenses in each essay attempts to mediate these elisions and to advance potentially transformative, democratising readings of the black Atlantic from both complex and complicating African and diasporic viewpoints. With the aim of realigning black Atlantic scholarship in this way, the edited volume proposes an interventionist approach that is con...
Spaces of Longing and Belonging offers the reader theoretical and interpretative studies of spatiality centered on a variety of literary and cultural contexts. It brings new and complementary insights to bear on creative uses of spatiality in artistic texts and generally into the field of spatiality as a cultural phenomenon, especially, although not exclusively, in terms of literary space. Ranging over questions of aesthetics, politics, sociohistorical concerns, issues of postcoloniality, transculturality, ecology and features of interpersonal spaces, among others, the essays provide a considerable collection of innovative pieces of scholarship on important questions relating to literary spatiality generally, as well as detailed analyses of particular works and authors. The volume includes ground-breaking theoretical investigations of crucial dimensions of spatiality in a context of increased global awareness.
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.
This book forges new ground in the relationship between cities and World Literature. Through a series of essays spanning a variety of metropolises, it shows how cities have given rise to key aesthetic dispositions, acts of linguistic and cultural translation, topographic conceptualizations, global imaginaries, and narratives of self-fashioning that are central to understanding World Literature and its debates. Alongside an introduction and three theoretical chapters, each chapter focuses on a particular city in the Global North or Global South, and brings World Literary debates—on translation, literary networks, imperial and migrant imaginaries, centers and peripheries—into conversation with the urban literary histories of Beijing, Bombay/Mumbai, Dublin, Cairo, Istanbul, Johannesburg, Lagos, London, Mexico City, Moscow and St Petersburg, New York, Paris, Singapore, and Sydney.
This book re-reads the last 60 years of Anglophone African women’s writing from a transnational and trans-historical feminist perspective, rather than postcolonial, from which these texts have been traditionally interpreted. Such a comparative frame throws into relief patterns across time and space that make it possible to situate this writing as an integral part of women’s literary history. Revisiting this literature in a comparative context with Western women writers since the 18th century, the author highlights how invocations of "tradition" have been used by patriarchy everywhere to subjugate women, the similarities between women’s struggles worldwide, and the feminist imagination ...
This book explores literary representations of African immigrant experiences in Western countries, against the backdrop of colonial stereotypes and recent expressions of anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe and America. The book deploys the concept of coloniality of migrancy to explore how global coloniality continues to shape the identities and lived experiences of African immigrants as represented in African diasporic literatures. It considers the persistence of racist and discriminatory attitudes and patterns of thought that developed during slavery and colonialism, and asks to what extent it is possible for African immigrants to transcend race in their configuration of their identity. Five...
"What Remains is a fusion of text, dance and movement to tell a story about the unexpected uncovering of a slave burial ground in Cape Town, the archaeological dig that follows and a city haunted by the memory of slavery. When the bones emerge from the ground, everyone in the city - slave descendants, archaeologists, citizens, property developers - is forced to reckon with a history sometimes remembered, sometimes forgotten. Loosely based on the events at Prestwich Place, What Remains forges a path between memory and magic, the uncanny and the known, waking and dreaming. Four figures - the archaeologist, the healer, the dancer and the student - move between bones and books, archives and madness, paintings and protest, as they struggle to reconcile the past with the now."--Back cover