Overview

African Women Writing Diaspora: Transnational Perspectives in the Twenty-First Century examines contemporary fiction by African women authors to resonate diaspora perspectives on what it means to be African within transnational spaces. Through a critical lens, the collection interrogates the ways in which women construct new ways of telling the African story in the global age of social, economic, and political transformation. African Women Writing Diaspora illustrates that for African women, life in the diaspora is an uncharted journey across new landscapes of identity beyond Africa’s borders as a unifying theme. The fictional works analyzed represent the leading women writers who dominate the African literary canon, and the contributors explore diverse themes of immigrant life, racialized identities, and otherness within transnational spaces of the west.

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9781793642455

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Reviews

African Women Writing Diaspora is one of the emerging books on the critical study of the fictional works of three generations of African women writers whose imaginative creativity has been shaped by their African homeland and African diasporic experiences. In seven chapters, experts in Anglophone and Francophone African literature, literary criticism, and rhetoric present refreshingly engaging and compelling critical narratives of the works of Chimamanda Adichie, Sefi Atta, No Violet Bulawayo, Amma Darko, Yaa Gyasi, Nnedi Okorafor, and Chika Unigwe, who through their transcontinental gaze as diaspora subjects, rooted in multiple identities, cultures, languages and localities, continuously push the boundaries of African literature by creating new frontiers of complex and dynamic diaspora, Afrofuturistic, and fantasy literatures grounded in feminist energies, and arouse critical inquiry into the changing nature of the genre. The book insightfully presents the intersectionality of race, class, gender, local and global realities that shaped the writers' and other African women's diaspora experiences within multicontinental settings and increasing economic, social, and political transformation. It interrogates the complexities of diverse ways of being African in the globalized world through the works of third generation African female writers who negotiate survival, vulnerability, subalternity, subjectivity, marginality, otherness, unfolding multiple sites of cultural hybridity, racial inequality, economic adversity, and other barriers to equality, employment, and legal status; and also (re)present the sophistication, oppositional consciousness, and the agency of African women within Africa and the globe. This is an important contribution to African literature, African Diaspora literature, feminist studies, science-fiction, and literary criticisms. -- Gloria Chuku, University of Maryland, Baltimore County It is no exaggeration to claim that without women writers there would be no twenty-first century African literature. Indeed, African women writers have held their own not only on the continent, but also on the world stage. Their writing, however, has yet to attract requisite scholarly attention, especially from Africa-descended scholars. African Women Writing Diaspora is a much-needed welcome critical assessment of these works. Central to these women's writing are their transcultural and transnational connections and identity interrogations, and the articles in this collection do a great job to examine these. I recommend it. -- Chielozona Eze, Northeastern Illinois University; author of Justice and Human Rights in the African Imagination: We, Too, Are Humans

Author Information

Rose A. Sackeyfio is associate professor of English in the Department of Liberal Studies at Winston-Salem State University.

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