Author: Joanne Chassot
Publisher: Dartmouth College Press
ISBN: 1512601616
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
The first monograph to investigate the poetics and politics of haunting in African diaspora literature, Ghosts of the African Diaspora: Re-Visioning History, Memory, and Identity examines literary works by five contemporary writers - Fred D'Aguiar, Gloria Naylor, Paule Marshall, Michelle Cliff, and Toni Morrison. Joanne Chassot argues that reading these texts through the lens of the ghost does cultural, theoretical, and political work crucial to the writers' engagement with issues of identity, memory, and history. Drawing on memory and trauma studies, postcolonial studies, and queer theory, this truly interdisciplinary volume makes an important contribution to the fast-growing field of spectrality studies.
Author: Atsuko Karin Matsuoka
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802083319
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
Focusing on African diaspora groups that have been virtually ignored in discussions of Canadian multiculturalism, the authors explore the re-creation of communities in exile and the myths of 'homeland' and 'return.'
Author: Aida Levy-Hussen
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479838144
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 223
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Book Description
How to Read African American Literature offers a series of provocations to unsettle the predominant assumptions readers make when encountering post-Civil Rights black fiction. Foregrounding the large body of literature and criticism that grapples with legacies of the slave past, Aida Levy-Hussen’s argument develops on two levels: as a textual analysis of black historical fiction, and as a critical examination of the reading practices that characterize the scholarship of our time. Drawing on psychoanalysis, memory studies, and feminist and queer theory, Levy-Hussen examines how works by Toni Morrison, David Bradley, Octavia Butler, Charles Johnson, and others represent and mediate social injury and collective grief. In the criticism that surrounds these novels, she identifies two major interpretive approaches: “therapeutic reading” (premised on the assurance that literary confrontations with historical trauma will enable psychic healing in the present), and “prohibitive reading” (anchored in the belief that fictions of returning to the past are dangerous and to be avoided). Levy-Hussen argues that these norms have become overly restrictive, standing in the way of a more supple method of interpretation that recognizes and attends to the indirect, unexpected, inconsistent, and opaque workings of historical fantasy and desire. Moving beyond the question of whether literature must heal or abandon historical wounds, Levy-Hussen proposes new ways to read African American literature now.
Author: Fred D'Aguiar
Publisher: Waveland Press
ISBN: 1478632399
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 239
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Book Description
A literary venture into the economic shadow that slavery cast, Feeding the Ghosts, based on a true story, lays bare the raw business of the slave trade. The Zong, a slave ship packed with captive African “stock,” is headed to the New World. When illness threatens to disable all on board and cut potential profits, the ship’s captain orders his crew to throw the sick into the ocean. After being hurled overboard, Mintah, a young female slave taken from a Danish mission, is able to climb back onto the ship. From her hiding place, she rouses the remaining slaves to rebel and stirs unease among the crew with a voice and conscience they seem unable to silence. Mintah’s courage and others’ reactions to it unfold in a suspenseful story of the struggle to live even when threatened by oblivion.
Author: Tiya Miles
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822338659
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400
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Book Description
Combines histories of the complex interactions between blacks and Natives in North America with examples and readings of art that has emerged from those exchanges.
Author: Heather Merrill
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135100073X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
Black Spaces examines how space and place are racialized, and the impacts on everyday experiences among African Italians, immigrants, and refugees. It explores the deeply intertwined histories of Africa and Europe, and how people of African descent negotiate, contest, and live with anti-blackness in Italy. The vast majority of people crossing the Mediterranean into Europe are from West Africa and the Horn of Africa. Their passage is part of the legacy of Italian and broader European engagement in colonial projects. This largely forgotten history corresponds with an ongoing effort to erase them from the Italian social landscape on arrival. Black Spaces examines these racialized spaces by blending a critical geographical approach to place and space with Afro-Pessimist and critical race perspectives on the lived experiences of Blackness and anti-blackness in Italy.
Author: Zetta Elliott
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781540357588
Category : African American children
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Zaria has dreamed of England for as long as she can remember-according to the novels she's read, everything magical happens there! When her grandfather suffers a stroke, Zaria and her mother head to London to help care for him. Zaria reads fantastic tales to her grandfather every afternoon, and she's thrilled to discover that her cousin Winston shares her love of wands, wizards, and mythical creatures. But Zaria soon finds that life in London is actually quite ordinary-until she goes on a day trip to nearby Windsor Castle. There Zaria meets two extraordinary ghosts who need help finding their way back to the African continent they once called home.
Author: Jenny Sharpe
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810141590
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
In this innovative study, Jenny Sharpe moves beyond the idea of art and literature as an alternative archive to the historical records of slavery and its aftermath. Immaterial Archives explores instead the intangible phenomena of affects, spirits, and dreams that Caribbean artists and writers introduce into existing archives. Through the works of Frantz Zéphirin, Edouard Duval-Carrié, M. NourbeSe Philip, Erna Brodber, and Kamau Brathwaite, Immaterial Archives examines silences as black female spaces, Afro-Creole sacred worlds as diasporic cartographies, and the imaginative conjoining of spirits with industrial technologies as disruptions of enlightened modernity.
Author: Jarrod Hayes
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472053167
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 341
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Book Description
Employing rootedness as a way of understanding identity has increasingly been subjected to acerbic political and theoretical critiques. Politically, roots narratives have been criticized for attempting to police identity through a politics of purity—excluding anyone who doesn’t share the same narrative. Theoretically, a critique of essentialism has led to a suspicion against essence and origins regardless of their political implications. The central argument of Queer Roots for the Diaspora is that, in spite of these debates, ultimately the desire for roots contains the “roots” of its own deconstruction. The book considers alternative root narratives that acknowledge the impossibility of returning to origins with any certainty; welcome sexual diversity; acknowledge their own fictionality; reveal that even a single collective identity can be rooted in multiple ways; and create family trees haunted by the queer others patrilineal genealogy seems to marginalize. The roots narratives explored in this book simultaneously assert and question rooted identities within a number of diasporas—African, Jewish, and Armenian. By looking at these together, one can discern between the local specificities of any single diaspora and the commonalities inherent in diaspora as a global phenomenon. This comparatist, interdisciplinary study will interest scholars in a diversity of fields, including diaspora studies, postcolonial studies, LGBTQ studies, French and Francophone studies, American studies, comparative literature, and literary theory.
Author: Tiya Miles
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0593596439
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
Three women uncover the secrets of a Georgia plantation that embodies the intertwined histories of Indigenous and enslaved Black communities—the fascinating debut novel, inspired by a true story, of the National Book Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of All That She Carried, now featuring a new introduction and discussion guide. “The Cherokee Rose is a mic drop—an instant classic. An invitation to listen to the urgent, sweet choruses of past and present.”—Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST Conducting research for her weekly history column, Jinx, a free-spirited Muscogee (Creek) historian, travels to Hold House, a Georgia plantation originally owned by Cherokee chief James Hold, to uncover the mystery of what happened to a tribal member who stayed behind after Indian removal, when Native Americans were forcibly displaced from their ancestral homelands in the nineteenth century. At Hold House, she meets Ruth, a magazine writer visiting on assignment, and Cheyenne, a Southern Black debutante seeking to purchase the estate. Hovering above them all is the spirit of Mary Ann Battis, the young Indigenous woman who remained in Georgia more than a century earlier. When they discover a diary left on the property that reveals even more about the house’s dark history, the three women’s connections to the place grow deeper. Over a long holiday weekend, Cheyenne is forced to reconsider the property’s rightful ownership, Jinx reexamines assumptions about her tribe’s racial history, and Ruth confronts her own family’s past traumas before surprising herself by falling into a new romance. Imbued with a nuanced understanding of history, The Cherokee Rose brings the past to life as Jinx, Ruth, and Cheyenne unravel mysteries with powerful consequences for them all.
