Female Diasporic Identity Formation. A Reading of Buchi Emecheta’s Afro-British Texts

Female Diasporic Identity Formation. A Reading of Buchi Emecheta’s Afro-British Texts PDF Author: Hind Essafir
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3346486354
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 62

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Book Description
Academic Paper from the year 2019 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, , language: English, abstract: Over the span of three centuries, the Afro-British tradition has managed to establish itself as a distinguished voice in Britain's literary and cultural scene. While unearthing its first attempts at self-definition, this dissertation first engages with the slave tradition in the particular context of Eighteenth century Enlightenment England, and explores how its emergence initiated the re-inscription of the black race within humankind after years of exclusion. By adopting a feminist and cultural perspective, this essay spotlights the female contribution, it equally examines the extent to which the double discrimination of race and gender further complicates the female identity formation project. Significantly, Second Class Citizen, In The Ditch and Head Above Water stand as typical Afro-British texts that strongly resonate with earlier voices of the tradition, while promoting strategies of resistance and ultimately disturbing contructions of womanhood and female subjectivity. Through these narratives, Buchi Emecheta inscribes herself as a true heiress of an Afro-British female textuality inaugurated two centuries earlier by a pioneering figure as prestigious as Mary Prince. In its effort to uncover the identity politics informing this literary and discursive body, this study lays emphasis on the significance of generic choice to the Afro-British female self-telling via autobiography, while placing it within the much wider project of nation-telling.

Female Diasporic Identity Formation. A Reading of Buchi Emecheta’s Afro-British Texts

Female Diasporic Identity Formation. A Reading of Buchi Emecheta’s Afro-British Texts PDF Author: Hind Essafir
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3346486354
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 62

Get Book Here

Book Description
Academic Paper from the year 2019 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, , language: English, abstract: Over the span of three centuries, the Afro-British tradition has managed to establish itself as a distinguished voice in Britain's literary and cultural scene. While unearthing its first attempts at self-definition, this dissertation first engages with the slave tradition in the particular context of Eighteenth century Enlightenment England, and explores how its emergence initiated the re-inscription of the black race within humankind after years of exclusion. By adopting a feminist and cultural perspective, this essay spotlights the female contribution, it equally examines the extent to which the double discrimination of race and gender further complicates the female identity formation project. Significantly, Second Class Citizen, In The Ditch and Head Above Water stand as typical Afro-British texts that strongly resonate with earlier voices of the tradition, while promoting strategies of resistance and ultimately disturbing contructions of womanhood and female subjectivity. Through these narratives, Buchi Emecheta inscribes herself as a true heiress of an Afro-British female textuality inaugurated two centuries earlier by a pioneering figure as prestigious as Mary Prince. In its effort to uncover the identity politics informing this literary and discursive body, this study lays emphasis on the significance of generic choice to the Afro-British female self-telling via autobiography, while placing it within the much wider project of nation-telling.

Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers

Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers PDF Author: Jean Wyatt
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429581351
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
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.

Mongrel Nation

Mongrel Nation PDF Author: Ashley Dawson
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472025058
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Mongrel Nation surveys the history of the United Kingdom’s African, Asian, and Caribbean populations from 1948 to the present, working at the juncture of cultural studies, literary criticism, and postcolonial theory. Ashley Dawson argues that during the past fifty years Asian and black intellectuals from Sam Selvon to Zadie Smith have continually challenged the United Kingdom’s exclusionary definitions of citizenship, using innovative forms of cultural expression to reconfigure definitions of belonging in the postcolonial age. By examining popular culture and exploring topics such as the nexus of race and gender, the growth of transnational politics, and the clash between first- and second-generation immigrants, Dawson broadens and enlivens the field of postcolonial studies. Mongrel Nation gives readers a broad landscape from which to view the shifting currents of politics, literature, and culture in postcolonial Britain. At a time when the contradictions of expansionist braggadocio again dominate the world stage, Mongrel Nation usefully illuminates the legacy of imperialism and suggests that creative voices of resistance can never be silenced.Dawson “Elegant, eloquent, and full of imaginative insight, Mongrel Nation is a refreshing, engaged, and informative addition to post-colonial and diasporic literary scholarship.” —Hazel V. Carby, Yale University “Eloquent and strong, insightful and historically precise, lively and engaging, Mongrel Nation is an expansive history of twentieth-century internationalist encounters that provides a broader landscape from which to understand currents, shifts, and historical junctures that shaped the international postcolonial imagination.” —May Joseph, Pratt Institute Ashley Dawson is Associate Professor of English at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center and the College of Staten Island. He is coeditor of the forthcoming Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism.

Second-class Citizen

Second-class Citizen PDF Author: Buchi Emecheta
Publisher: Heinemann
ISBN: 9780435909918
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
"Adah, a woman from the Ibo tribe, moves to England to live with her Nigerian student husband. She soon discovers that life for a young Nigerian woman living in London in the 1960s is grim. Rejected by British society and thwarted by her husband, who expects her to be subservient to him, she is forced to face up to life as a second-class citizen."--Back cover

In the Ditch

In the Ditch PDF Author: Buchi Emecheta
Publisher: Penguin Classics
ISBN: 9780241578124
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
'Sad, sonorous, occasionally hilarious, an extraordinary first novel' Washington Post 'Striking . . . brings sexism and classism into equal focus' The Paris Review Adah is a single mother of five, living in a dank, crumbling housing estate for 'problem families', avoiding the rats and rubbish. It's not quite the new start in London she had planned. As she navigates the complicated welfare system that keeps her trapped in poverty, can she cling to her dream of a better life, and find somewhere that feels like home? Buchi Emecheta's scorching debut novel drew on her own experiences to paint a moving picture of hope, unexpected friendship, and survival. In the Ditch joins The Joys of Motherhood and Second-Class Citizen in Penguin Modern Classics, with a bespoke cover design from Turner Prize-winning artist Chris Ofili. 'Buchi Emecheta was the foremother of black British women's writing' Bernardine Evaristo

The New Tribe

The New Tribe PDF Author: Buchi Emecheta
Publisher: Heinemann
ISBN: 9780435912048
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
From best-selling author Holly Webb comes a brand new series full of mystery and intrigue following the adventures of a very determined heroine and her dog! Holly Webb fans will be thrilled to pieces to discover the adventures of Maisie Hitchins, the pluckiest little detective in Victorian London. Maisie Hitchins lives in her grandmother’s boarding house, longing for adventure. She idolizes the famous detective, Gilbert Carrington, and follows his every case. But Maisie is about to be given the opportunity of a lifetime: her own mystery to solve! In the first book in this fantastic new series, Maisie rescues a puppy in peril whilst running an errand, and adopts him. She decides to investigate the puppy’s original cruel owner, but instead gets tangled up in an intriguing plot involving stolen sausages, pilfered halfpennies and a fast-paced bicycle chase. The streets of Victorian London are never safe, but Maisie’s on the case!

There But For The

There But For The PDF Author: Ali Smith
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307379981
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
From the acclaimed, award-winning author—when a dinner-party guest named Miles locks himself in an upstairs room and refuses to come out, he sets off a media frenzy. He also sets in motion a mesmerizing puzzle of a novel, one that harnesses acrobatic verbal playfulness to a truly affecting story. Miles communicates only by cryptic notes slipped under the door. We see him through the eyes of four people who barely know him, ranging from a precocious child to a confused elderly woman. But while the characters’ wit and wordplay soar, their story remains profoundly grounded. As it probes our paradoxical need for both separation and true connection, There but for the balances cleverness with compassion, the surreal with the deeply, movingly real, in a way that only Ali Smith can.

The Final Passage

The Final Passage PDF Author: Caryl Phillips
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0525562818
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
From the British-West Indian novelist who is rapidly emerging as the bard of the African diaspora comes a haunting work about “the final passage”—the exodus of black West Indians from their impoverished islands to the uncertain opportunities of England. In her village of St. Patrick’s, Leila Preston has no prospects, a young son, and a husband, Michael, who seems to prefer the company of his mistress. So when her ailing mother travels to England for medical care, Leila decides to follow her. As Caryl Phillips follows the Prestons’ outward voyage—and their bewildered attempt to find a home in a country whose rooming houses post signs announcing “No vacancies for coloureds”—he produces a tragicomic portrait of hope and dislocation. The Final Passage is a novel rich in language, acute in its grasp of character, and unforgettable in its vision of the colonial legacy. “Like Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez, Phillips writes of times so heady and chaotic and of characters so compelling that time moves as if guided by the moon and dreams.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review

Middle Passages and the Healing Place of History

Middle Passages and the Healing Place of History PDF Author: Elizabeth Brown-Guillory
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
ISBN: 0814210384
Category : African diaspora in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Middle Passages and the Healing Place of History: Migration and Identity in Black Women's Literature brings together a series of essays addressing black women's fragmented identities and quests for wholeness. The individual essays concern culturally specific experiences of blacks in select African countries, England, the Caribbean, the United States, and Canada. They examine identity struggles by establishing the Middle Passage as the first site of identity rupture and the subsequent break from cultural and historical moorings. In most cases, the authors themselves have migrated from their places of origin to new spaces that present challenges. Their narratives replicate the displacement engendered by their own experiences of living with the complexities of diasporic existence. Their female characters, many of whom participate in multiple border crossings, work to define themselves within a hostile environment. In nearly every essay, the female characters struggle against multiple yokes of oppression, giving voice to what it means to be black, female, poor, old, and alone. The subjects' migrations and journeys are analyzed as attempts to heal the "displacement," both physical and psychological, that results from dislocation and relocation from the homeland, imagined variously as Africa. This volume reveals that black women across the globe share a common ground fraught with struggles, but the narratives bear out that these women are not easily divided and that they stand upon each other's shoulders dispensing healing balms. Black women's history and herstory commingle; the trauma that ensued when Africans were loaded onto ships in chains continues to haunt black women, and men, too, wherever they find themselves in this present moment of the Diaspora.

A Particular Kind of Black Man

A Particular Kind of Black Man PDF Author: Tope Folarin
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 1501171836
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
**One of Time’s 32 Books You Need to Read This Summer** An NPR Best Book of 2019 An “electrifying” (Publishers Weekly) debut novel from Rhodes Scholar and winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing about a Nigerian family living in Utah and their uneasy assimilation to American life. Living in small-town Utah has always been an uncomfortable fit for Tunde Akinola’s family, especially for his Nigeria-born parents. Though Tunde speaks English with a Midwestern accent, he can’t escape the children who rub his skin and ask why the black won’t come off. As he struggles to fit in, he finds little solace from his parents who are grappling with their own issues. Tunde’s father, ever the optimist, works tirelessly chasing his American dream while his wife, lonely in Utah without family and friends, sinks deeper into schizophrenia. Then one otherwise-ordinary morning, Tunde’s mother wakes him with a hug, bundles him and his baby brother into the car, and takes them away from the only home they’ve ever known. But running away doesn’t bring her, or her children, any relief; once Tunde’s father tracks them down, she flees to Nigeria, and Tunde never feels at home again. He spends the rest of his childhood and young adulthood searching for connection—to the wary stepmother and stepbrothers he gains when his father remarries; to the Utah residents who mock his father’s accent; to evangelical religion; to his Texas middle school’s crowd of African-Americans; to the fraternity brothers of his historically black college. In so doing, he discovers something that sends him on a journey away from everything he has known. Sweeping, stirring, and perspective-shifting, A Particular Kind of Black Man is “wild, vulnerable, lived…A study of the particulate self, the self as a constellation of moving parts” (The New York Times Book Review).