Gender and the Spatiality of Blackness in Contemporary AfroFrench Narratives
Gender and the Spatiality of Blackness in Contemporary AfroFrench Narratives

Author: Polo B. Moji

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-03-29

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 100054768X

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This book approaches the study of AfroEurope through narrative forms produced in contemporary France, a location which richly illustrates race in European spaces. The book adopts a transdisciplinary lens that combines critical black and urban geographies, intersectional feminism, and textual analysis to explore the spatial negotiations of black women in France. It assesses literature, film, and music as narrative forms and engages with the sociocultural and political contexts from which they emerge. Through the figure of the black flâneuse and the analytical framework of "walking as method", the book goes beneath spectacular representations of ghettoised banlieues, televised protests, and shipwrecked migrants to analyse the spatiality of blackness in the everyday. It argues that the material-discursive framing of black flânerie, as both relational and embodied movements, renders visible a politics of place embedded in everyday micro-struggles of raced-sexed subjects. Foregrounding expressive modes and forms that have traditionally received little critical attention outside of the French and francophone world, this book will be relevant to academics, researchers, writers, students, activists, and readers with interests in Literary and Cultural Studies, African and Afrodiasporic Studies, Black Feminisms, Migration Studies, Critical Black Geographies, Francophone Studies, and the comparative framework of Afroeuropean Studies.

Reframing the Black Atlantic
Reframing the Black Atlantic

Author: Aretha Phiri

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-08-09

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 104010424X

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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.

The Routledge Handbook for Global South Studies on Subjectivities
The Routledge Handbook for Global South Studies on Subjectivities

Author: Sebastian Thies

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-05-09

Total Pages: 383

ISBN-13: 1003860508

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The Routledge Handbook for Global South Studies on Subjectivities provides a series of exemplary studies conjoining perspectives from Asian, African, and Latin American Studies on subjectivity in the Global South as a central category of social and cultural analysis. The contestation of the Northern myth of the autonomous subject—the dispositive that contests subject formation in the South by describing it as fragmented, incomplete, delayed or simply deviant, has been a cornerstone of theory production from the South over the years. This volume’s contributions offer an interdisciplinary and transarea dialogue, reframing issues of selfhood and alterity, of personhood, of the human, of the commons and contesting the North’s presumption in determining what kind of subjectivities abide by its norms, whose voices are heard, who is recognised as a subject, and, by extension, whose lives matter. In the context of the shifting dynamics of today’s manifold crises, they raise questions regarding how subjectivities act on or resist such forms of contestation, contingency, and indeterminacy. A major contribution to the growing body of scholarship on the Global South, this handbook will be an essential resource for students, scholars, researchers and instructors in literature, media and culture studies, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, law, politics, visual arts and art history.

Feminism and Modernity in Anglophone African Women’s Writing
Feminism and Modernity in Anglophone African Women’s Writing

Author: Dobrota Pucherová

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-07-29

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 1000620298

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This book re-reads the last 60 years of Anglophone African women’s writing from a transnational and trans-historical feminist perspective, rather than postcolonial, from which these texts have been traditionally interpreted. Such a comparative frame throws into relief patterns across time and space that make it possible to situate this writing as an integral part of women’s literary history. Revisiting this literature in a comparative context with Western women writers since the 18th century, the author highlights how invocations of "tradition" have been used by patriarchy everywhere to subjugate women, the similarities between women’s struggles worldwide, and the feminist imagination it produced. The author argues that in the 21st century, African feminism has undergone a major epistemic shift: from a culturally exclusive to a relational feminism that conceptualizes African femininity through the risky opening of oneself to otherness, transculturation, and translation. Like Western feminists in the 1960s, contemporary African women writers are turning their attention to the female body as the prime site of women’s oppression and freedom, reframing feminism as a demand for universal human rights and actively shaping global discourses on gender, modernity, and democracy. The book will be of interest to students and researchers of African literature, but also feminist literary scholars and comparatists more generally.

Coloniality and Migrancy in African Diasporic Literatures
Coloniality and Migrancy in African Diasporic Literatures

Author: Peter Moopi

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-10-06

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 1000968596

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This book explores literary representations of African immigrant experiences in Western countries, against the backdrop of colonial stereotypes and recent expressions of anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe and America. The book deploys the concept of coloniality of migrancy to explore how global coloniality continues to shape the identities and lived experiences of African immigrants as represented in African diasporic literatures. It considers the persistence of racist and discriminatory attitudes and patterns of thought that developed during slavery and colonialism, and asks to what extent it is possible for African immigrants to transcend race in their configuration of their identity. Five key twenty-first century African diasporic novels are considered in the analysis: Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers, Dave Eggers’ What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names and Helon Habila’s Travellers. Overall, the book demonstrates that despite the hostility migrants of colour encounter, Africans are shunning the victimhood of colonialism and slavery and finding alternative ways of navigating and inhabiting the modern world. Foregrounding the usefulness of decoloniality and postcolonial theory as theoretical tools, this book will be an invaluable resource to researchers across the fields of African literature, migration, sociology, politics, and decolonial studies.

Cinematic Imaginaries of the African City
Cinematic Imaginaries of the African City

Author: Danai S. Mupotsa

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-08-30

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 1000924408

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This volume addresses questions at the intersections of cinematic form and the African city. It examines the contribution of cinema and audiovisual media to our understanding and experience of contemporary cities from an African perspective. “Reading” the African city as form, this volume problematizes the circulation of terms such as “Afropolitanism,” “Afro-polis”, “Afro-modernity” and “Afro-urbanity”, which often define the kinds of sentiments invested in or associated with the African city. Situated within an interdisciplinary matrix that reads the urban African cinematic form through affect theory and the city as a matrix of feeling, critical black geography and the racialized construction of city spaces, the urban as a temporal consciousness, and representations of social inequalities and urban geographies of exclusion, this edited volume frames the city and screenscapes as co-constitutive, foregrounding the diegetic and extra-diegetic elements that inform the “African urban”. Chapters engage thematic areas such as aesthetics and African cinematic urban form; visuality and the infrastructures of the African city; audiovisual narratives, social inequality, and urban geographies of exclusion. Cinematic Imaginaries of the African City is a significant new contribution to African Studies and will be a great resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of African Studies, Media and Cultural Studies, Visual Studies, and Sociology. The chapters included in this book were originally published as a special issue of Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies.

The Persian Mirror
The Persian Mirror

Author: Susan Mokhberi

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-10-21

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0190884819

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The Persian Mirror explores France's preoccupation with Persia in the seventeenth century. Long before Montesquieu's Persian Letters, French intellectuals, diplomats and even ordinary Parisians were fascinated by Persia and eagerly consumed travel accounts, fairy tales, and the spectacle of the Persian ambassador's visit to Paris and Versailles in 1715. Using diplomatic sources, fiction and printed and painted images, The Persian Mirror describes how the French came to see themselves in Safavid Persia. In doing so, it revises our notions of orientalism and the exotic and suggests that early modern Europeans had more nuanced responses to Asia than previously imagined.

Adventure Capital
Adventure Capital

Author: Julie Kleinman

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2019-10-22

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0520304411

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Paris’s Gare du Nord is one of the busiest international transit centers in the world. In the past three decades, it has become an important hub for West African migrants—self-fashioned adventurers—navigating life in the city. In this groundbreaking work, Julie Kleinman chronicles how West Africans use the Gare du Nord to create economic opportunities, confront police harassment, and forge connections to people outside of their communities. Drawing on ten years of ethnographic research, including an internship at the French national railway company, Kleinman reveals how racial inequality is ingrained in the order of Parisian public space. She vividly describes the extraordinary ways that African migrants retool French transit infrastructure to build alternative pathways toward social and economic integration where state institutions have failed. In doing so, these adventurers defy boundaries—between migrant and citizen, center and periphery, neighbor and stranger—that have shaped urban planning and immigration policy. Adventure Capital offers a new understanding of contemporary migration and belonging, capturing the central role that West African migrants play in revitalizing French urban life.