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This book sets out to investigate how contemporary African diasporic women writers respond to the imbalances, pressures and crises of twenty-first-century globalization by querying the boundaries between two separate conceptual domains: love and space. The study breaks new ground by systematically bringing together critical love studies with research into the cultures of migration, diaspora and refuge. Examining a notable tendency among current black feminist writers, poets and performers to insist on the affective dimension of world-making, the book ponders strategies of reconfiguring postcolonial discourses. Indeed, the analyses of literary works and intermedia performances by Chimamanda Adichie, Zadie Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, Shailja Patel and Warsan Shire reveal an urge of moving beyond a familiar insistence on processes of alienation or rupture and towards a new, reparative emphasis on connection and intimacy - to imagine possible inhabitable worlds.
List of contents
1 Introduction: Be/longing.- 2 Routes of Desire: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.- 3 London Lovers: Zadie Smith.- 4 Longing Elsewhere: Helen Oyeyemi.- 5 Opening Wor(l)ds: Warsan Shire and Shailja Patel.- 6 Coda: "Dreaming of a yet unwritten future".
About the author
Jennifer Leetsch is a Lecturer in Anglophone Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Würzburg, Germany. Her research focuses on affect, gender and the black diaspora, and she has previously published on desire and intimacy in African diasporic novels, the African European spatial imagination, refugee geocorpographies and diasporic digital media.
Report
"Leetsch's nuanced handling of how topography, typography, space, and language become intertwined with love, intimacy, desire, and romance is, for me, the most generative contribution. The comparative approach that links spatial and affective thinking represents a valuable starting point for further approaches to contemporary African diasporic literature." (Marco Medugno, Contemporary Women's Writing, September 25, 2023)
