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

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Experimentation and Subjectivity in Global Black Women's Novels: Jean Wyatt and Sheldon George 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: Jenni Ramone 2 “This One Here Is Not Me”: Decolonizing Female Subjectivities in Paulina Chiziane's Niketche: Uma história de poligamia: Dorothée Boulanger 3 Zimbabwean Decolonization and Colonial Education: Ubuntu (Hunhu) in Tsitsi Dangarembga's The Book of Not: Brendon Nicholls 4 Holding-Shedding: Akwaeke Emezi's Freshwater, ToniMorrison's Beloved, and Celestine Chukwuemeka Mbaegbu's Igbo Metaphysics: Pelagia Goulimari Part Two Contemporary African American Women Writers 5 Constructing Black Women's Interiorities in Toni Morrison's Beloved: Angelyn Mitchell 6 Writing (Against) Abjection in Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing: Claudine Raynaud 7 “Is Your Mother Well?”: Touch and the Racialized Maternal Subject in Toni Morrison's “Recitatif ” and Octavia Butler's “Bloodchild”: Naomi Morgenstern 8 “Are You Now So Deluded You Think 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: Milo Obourn 9 Desire Beyond the Limits of Sanity: Subjectivity and Psychic Spatiality in Toni Morrison's Paradise: Sheldon George Part Three Contemporary Caribbean Women Writers 10 Authoring Selfhood: Experiments in Self-Making in Jamaica Kincaid, Dionne Brand and Diana Evans: Denise deCaires Narain 11 From “Half ” to “Half,” or the Question of Being in Alecia McKenzie's Sweetheart: Andrée-Anne Kekeh-Dika 12 Imagining a Past/Future Self: Tan-Tan in Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber: Rhonda D. Frederick Part Four: Contemporary Black British Women Writers 13 Disorienting Subjectivity: Spatial Relations and Yoruba Themes in Helen Oyeyemi's The Icarus Girl: Jean Wyatt 14 Welcoming Familiars: Memory Work in Bernardine Evaristo's Fiction: Jennifer Gustar 15 “An Unexpected Turn”: Coincidence and Community in Aminatta Forna's Happiness: Helen Cousins

About the Author :
Jean Wyatt is Professor Emeritus of English at Occidental College, USA. Her previous publications include Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels (2017) and, with Sheldon George, she edited Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers (2020). Her articles include: “Freud, Laplanche, Leonardo: Sustaining Enigma” American Imago (2019); "Reinventing the Gothic in Helen Oyeyemi's 'White is for Witching': Maternal Ethics and Racial Politics,” in Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers; “Dislocating the Reader: Slave Motherhood and the Disrupted Temporality of Trauma in Toni Morrison's Beloved,” in The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis (ed.Vera Camden, 2022); and “Mirror Mirror: The Visual Economy of Race in Helen Oyeyemi's Boy, Snow, Bird,” and “Alter Egos in Nella Larsen's Passing and Helen Oyeyemi's Boy, Snow, Bird: Race and Dissociation” for Angelaki. Sheldon George is Professor of Africana Studies at University of Massachusetts, Boston. His scholarship focuses on race and racism through a study of culture, literature and theory. George is an associate editor of Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society and chair of the MLA Executive Committee for the forum, Psychology, Psychoanalysis and Literature. He is author of Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity (2016); co-editor, with Derek Hook, of Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity, and Psychoanalytic Theory (2021); and co-editor, with Jean Wyatt, of Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form (2020).

Review :
The book we've been wanting on narrative experimentation and black diaspora women's writing.