Experimental Subjectivities in Global Black Women's Writing: Race and Narrative Innovation (Bloomsbury Studies in Global Womens Writing)

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. Cover Halftitle page Series page Title page Copyright page Contents Contributors Introduction: Experimentation and Subjectivity in Global Black Women’s Novels Language and Subjectivity Close Reading and Cultural Context Cultural Context and Experimentation African Americans: Responding to the History of Racialized Subjectivity Africa: Language and the Expression of Contemporary Subjectivity The Caribbean: Decolonizing Strategies for Literature and Language Black British Women Writers: Diasporic Inspirations Chapter Descriptions Thematic Intersections Across Borders Conclusion Notes References Part One Contemporary African Women Writers: Uganda, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Nigeria 1 “There Are Things You Don’t Need to Be Told. You Suckle Them at Your Mother’s Teat”: Dynamic Subjectivity, Breastfeeding, and Storycrafting in The First Woman by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi Marriage and Migration Afropolitanism, Postcolonialism, Place Storycrafting: “She Is a Story. A Story which Aggravated Our Situation” Breastfeeding: “That Charcoally Breast Feeding that Zungu Baby” Conclusion References 2“This One Here Is Not Me”: Decolonizing Female Subjectivities in Paulina Chiziane’s Niketche: Uma história de poligamia Re-membering the Self Redefining Womanhood Through Initiation Structural Misogyny and Its Racist Subtext in Postcolonial Mozambique Centering Women’s Relationships: Taming Polygamy? Community Beyond the Human: The “Vegan Unconscious” in Niketche Conclusion Notes References 3 Zimbabwean Decolonization and Colonial Education: Ubuntu (Hunhu) in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s The Book of Not Fanon and the Colonial Object-World Split Narrative Sites The Body in an Insurgent Landscape Dissociation Food and Micro-Aggressions Ubuntu and Settler Colonial Education Conclusion Notes References 4 Holding—Shedding: Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Celestine Chukwuemeka Mbaegbu’s Igbo Metaphysics Acknowledgements Notes References Part Two Contemporary African American Women Writers 5 Constructing Black Women’s Interiorities in Toni Morrison’s Beloved Baby Suggs: The Matriarch Sethe: The Mother Denver: The Daughter Conclusion Notes References 6 Writing (Against) Abjection in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing “Inside Out”: The Animal Within5 “Like a Carcass’s from a Hook”: Straying and Strayed Subject Hauntology: “Abjected” Ghosts “Fuck the Skin”: Miscegenation, Regurgitation, Keening Notes References 7 “Is Your Mother Well?”: Touch and the Racialized Maternal Subject in Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif ” and Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild” “Recitatif” Notes References 8 “Are You Now So Deluded You Th ink You Exist Outside the Category of Everything?”: A Posthumanist Critical Disability Analysis of Black Motherhood Beyond Cisgenderism in Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts Ungendered Black Motherhood Animacy, Life, and Autist-lens Autistext, Metaphors, and Transfiguring the Black Mother Cisgender Performativity Notes References 9 Desire Beyond the Limits of Sanity: Subjectivity and Psychic Spatiality in Toni Morrison’s Paradise Narrative Space and Fantasies of Paradise Consolata’s Homeless Desire Connie and the Third World Space of the Split Psyche Notes References Part Three Contemporary Caribbean Women Writers 10 Authoring Selfhood: Experiments in Self-Making in Jamaica Kincaid, Dionne Brand and Diana Evans Realism and the Experimental “My Biography Is My Books”6 “Let’s Face It. We’re Undone by Each Other”9 “You Could Never Pass. You Could Never Be a Real Person”11 “Someone Like Me, Reading” “Do You Ever Feel like That, like You’re Losing Track of Who You Are?”18 Notes References 11 From “Half” to “Half,” or the Question of Being in Alecia McKenzie’s Sweetheart Being Subject, Becoming Self? Half and Half, or the Question of Contemporary “Middle Passages” Passing the Ashes Asymmetry at Work: Location, the Plane and the Hurricane The Routes of Story Art Trade from Yard: Voice-Text-Image, or Restoring a Collaborative and Creative Milieu “Being There and Being Gone”20 Notes References 12 Imagining a Past/Future Self: Tan-Tan in Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber Notes References Part Four Contemporary Black British Women Writers 13 Disorienting Subjectivity: Spatial Relations and Yoruba Themes in Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl A Space of Containment Subjectivity, Embodiment, and Spatial Relations The Grotesque Body Reader Response and Narrative Sequence Fern: Yoruba Cultural Beliefs about Twins What Happens in the Ending? The Bush: Twins and Reincarnation Notes References 14 Welcoming Familiars: Memory Work in Bernardine Evaristo’s Fiction Lara: Postmemory The Emperor’s Babe: Uncanny Familiars Girl, Woman, Other: Welcoming Familiars Conclusion: Black Women’s Time Notes References 15 “An Unexpected Turn”:1 Coincidence and Community in Aminatta Forna’s Happiness Introduction Coincidence as Connection Trauma as Alienation Black Subjectivity as Community Conclusion Note References Index