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Commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of Paul Gilroy's seminal text, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, this book offers fresh interpretations of established black Atlantic scholarship from the perspective of those typically elided from its ideological purview and existential narrative. The application of queer and/or feminist lenses in each essay attempts to mediate these elisions and to advance potentially transformative, democratising readings of the black Atlantic from both complex and complicating African and diasporic viewpoints. With the aim of realigning black Atlantic scholarship in this way, the edited volume proposes an interventionist approach that is concerned with problematizing ethnic/ cultural universalisms and challenging geographic and gendered hierarchizations. Underlining the importance of aesthetic and creative cultural archives, Reframing the Black Atlantic's focus on transnational African diasporic literature and other intersecting popular cultural forms probes the (imaginative) limits and possibilities of the black Atlantic, conventionally conceived. To this end, this book intends not just to complicate and enhance established views of black Africa; inviting the reader to locate and perceive black life lived otherwise, it points towards more inclusive and expansive global understandings and visions of blackness.
This volume will be of particular use to researchers and students in the fields of race/gender, diaspora/transnational, literary and cultural studies. The chapters of this book were originally published in Cultural Studies.
List of contents
Introduction: Reframing the Black Atlantic
Aretha Phiri
1. The ruse of impurity: Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic and the politics of hybridity
Marzia Milazzo
2. 'It was a departure of sorts': Glocal homes in recent short fiction by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Efemia Chela, Chibundu Onuzo and Lesley Nneka ArimahCopperbelt
Jennifer Terry
3. Feeling against the plot: An African diaspora feminist politics of happiness
Samantha Pinto
4. How black is African Noir?: Defining blackness through crime fiction
Sam Naidu
5. Queering the black Atlantic: Transgender spaces in Akwaeke Emezi's writing and visual art
Rocío Cobo-Piñero
6. Oceanic bellies and liquid feminism in Fatou Diome's Le Ventre de l'Atlantique
Polo B. Moji
7. Migrating narratives: Re-inscribing black diaspora cultures
Aretha Phiri
8. Interview: 'The elephant in the room': Talking (physics of) blackness with Michelle M. Wright
Aretha Phiri & Michelle M. Wright
Afterword: Engendering new century black transnationalisms
Laura Chrisman
About the author
Aretha Phiri researches the intersectional interactions of race, ethnicity, culture, gender and sexualities in comparative, transnational and transatlantic considerations of identity and subjectivity, with a focus on African American, American and contemporary diasporic African literature. Currently on the editorial boards of Safundi and English in Africa, she has been a fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS), the Institute for Black Atlantic Research (IBAR), the Centre for the Study of International Slavery (CSIS), the National Humanities Center (NHC) and the Library of Congress (LoC).
Summary
Commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of Paul Gilroy’s seminal text, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, this book offers fresh interpretations of established black Atlantic scholarship from the perspective of those typically elided from its ideological purview and existential narrative.
