Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form (Narrative Theory and Culture)

"Reading Contemporary African American and Black British Women Writers: Narrative, Race, Ethics brings together British and American scholars to explore how, in texts by contemporary black women writers in the U. S. and Britain, formal narrative techniques express new understandings of race or stimulate ethical thinking about race in a reader. Taken together, the essays also demonstrate that black women writers from both sides of the Atlantic borrow formal structures and literary techniques from one another to describe the workings of structural racism in the daily lives of black subjects and to provoke readers to think anew about race. Narratology has only recently begun to use race as a category of narrative theory. This collection seeks both to show the ethical effects of narrative form on individual readers and to foster reconceptualizations of narrative theory that account for the workings of race within literature and culture"-- Résumé de l'éditeur Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form brings together British and American scholars to explore how, in texts by contemporary black women writers in the U.S. and Britain, formal narrative techniques express new understandings of race or stimulate ethical thinking about race in a reader. Taken together, the essays demonstrate that black women writers from both sides of the Atlantic borrow formal structures and literary techniques from one another to describe the workings of structural racism in the daily lives of black subjects and to provoke readers to think anew about race. Narratology has only recently begun to use race as a category of narrative theory. This collection seeks both to show the ethical effects of narrative form on individual readers and to foster reconceptualizations of narrative theory that account for the workings of race within literature and culture. Cover 1 Half Title 4 Series 5 Title 6 Copyright 7 Contents 8 Introduction: Narrative Theory and Contemporary Black Women Writers 10 Part 1 African American Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form 22 1 At the Crossroads of Form and Ideology: Disidentification in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen 24 2 “She Was Miraculously Neutral”: Feeling, Ethics and Metafiction in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah 42 3 Disabling Racial Economies: Ableism and the Reproduction of Racial Difference in Nella Larsen’s Passing and Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif” 61 4 “When We Speak of Otherness”: Narrative Unreliability and the Ethics of Othering in Toni Morrison’s Jazz and Home 78 5 Learning to Listen in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing 97 6 Maternal Sovereignty: Destruction and Survival in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones 113 7 Narrating the Raced Subject: Toni Morrison’s Jazz and the Literature of Modernism 131 Part 2 Black British Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form 150 8 Swing Time: Zadie Smith’s Aesthetic of Active Ambivalence 152 9 Zadie Smith’s Narratives of the Absurd: A Social Vision Represented through Humor 170 10 Buchi Emecheta: Storyteller, Sociologist and Citizen of the World 187 11 “Where Are You (Really) From?” Transgender Ethics, Ethics of Unknowing, and Transformative Adoption in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet and Toni Morrison’s Jazz 205 12 White Allyship and Narrative Dissonance in Andrea Levy’s Small Island 224 13 “Civis Romana Sum”: Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe and the Emancipatory Poetics of (Multi-) Cultural Citizenship 242 14 Reinventing the Gothic in Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching: Maternal Ethics and Racial Politics 263 Notes on Contributors 281 Index 286 "Contemporary African American and Black British Women Writers: Narrative, Race, Ethics brings together British and American scholars to explore how, in texts by contemporary black women writers in the U. S. and Britain, formal narrative techniques express new understandings of race or stimulate ethical thinking about race in a reader. Taken together, the essays also demonstrate that black women writers from both sides of the Atlantic borrow formal structures and literary techniques from one another to describe the workings of structural racism in the daily lives of black subjects and to provoke readers to think anew about race. Narratology has only recently begun to use race as a category of narrative theory. This collection seeks both to show the ethical effects of narrative form on individual readers and to foster reconceptualizations of narrative theory that account for the workings of race within literature and culture"-- Provided by publisher