Academic literature on the topic 'African Migrant Novel'
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Journal articles on the topic "African Migrant Novel"
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Nwanyanwu, Augustine Uka. "Transculturalism, Otherness, Exile, and Identity in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah." Matatu 49, no. 2 (2017): 386–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18757421-04902008.
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Abstract Today African literature exhibits and incorporates the decentred realities of African writers themselves as they negotiate and engage with multifarious forms of diaspora experience, dislocation, otherness, displacement, identity, and exile. National cultures in the twenty-first century have undergone significant decentralization. New African writing is now generated in and outside Africa by writers who themselves are products of transcultural forms and must now interrogate existence in global cities, transnational cultures, and the challenges of immigrants in these cities. Very few novels explore the theme of otherness and identity with as much insight as Adichie’s Americanah. The novel brings together opposing cultural forms, at once transcending and celebrating the local, and exploring spaces for the self where identity and otherness can be viewed and clarified. This article endeavours to show how African emigrants seek to affirm, manipulate, and define identity, reclaiming a space for self where migrant culture is marginalized. Adichie’s exemplary focus on transcultural engagement in Americanah provides an accurate representation of present-day African literary production in its dialectical dance between national and international particularities.
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Goldblatt, Cullen. "Setting readers at sea: Fatou Diome’s Ventre de l’Atlantique." Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 56, no. 1 (2019): 89–101. http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2309-9070/tvl.v.56i1.6275.
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Fatou Diome’s first novel, Le Ventre de l’Atlantique (2003), can be read as a work of migrant literature in which the Atlantic figures as a separating expanse beholden to a single past, that of the Atlantic Slave Trade. The ocean divides contemporary African migrants to Europe from the continent, as it did enslaved Africans taken forcibly to the Americas; it consumes a returned impoverished migrant, as it swallowed those who did not survive the Middle Passage. Yet for the authorial protagonist, Salie, and her island home, the Senegalese fishing village of Niodior, the Atlantic evokes multiple histories and experiences. This ocean is a place of freedom, as well as its absence; of daily sustenance, as well as migration; of life, as well as death; of postcolonial violence, as well as the violence of the Trade. The novel’s Atlantic, like the text as a whole, alludes to many pasts and, at times, abandons the dualities of place, race, and gender that organize most contemporary discourse about migration and oppression. Passages of opaque desire and oblique critique diverge from a dichotomous geography of continents and subject positions. Where Salie and Niodior emerge uncontained by categories inherited from colonial discourses, there are intimations of what genuinely postcolonial freedom might be.
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Ligaga, Dina. "Ambiguous agency in the vulnerable trafficked body: reading Sanusi’s Eyo and Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street." Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 56, no. 1 (2019): 74–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2309-9070/tvl.v.56i1.6274.
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The narrativization of the trafficked body in the novels of Abidemi Sanusi and Chika Unigwe allows for a contemplation of Europe in African migrant imaginaries as both promise and failure. Sanusi’s Eyo is a narrative of a ten-year-old girl who is trafficked to the United Kingdom as a human sex slave. The novel draws attention to the tensions that define her being/unbeing in Europe and beyond, even after a brave escape from her traffickers. This precarious existence is enhanced in Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street, whose main characters exist in Europe selling their bodies while existing in states of continuous vulnerability. In reading these two novels side by side, this article explores the discursive meanings of trafficked bodies and how traumatic existence allows for an engagement with Europe as illusory in the imaginaries of African women who cross borders into Europe. The article argues that while the female characters are vulnerable, they retain an ambiguous agency contained within their ability to survive and remain resilient in the face of atrocities for borders crossers. The narrative form of the novel allows for an exploration of what this agency looks like in the face of extreme vulnerability.
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Weichselbaumer, Doris. "Discrimination Against Migrant Job Applicants in Austria: An Experimental Study." German Economic Review 18, no. 2 (2017): 237–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/geer.12104.
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Abstract This paper presents the results of an experimental study that examined the employment opportunities of Austrians with and without a migration background when applying for job openings. Previous experiments used applicants’ names as indicators for different ethnicities, but this signal may not always be perceived as intended by the experimenters. In this study, a novel approach was applied that signals ethnic background using carefully matched photos as distinct visual cues. While the results document employment discrimination against all groups with a migration background, it is most pronounced for applicants with African heritage. To determine why and when discrimination occurs, an array of firm- and job-specific characteristics were examined. However, they offer little help in explaining the level of employment discrimination in Austria.
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Vicente, Mário, Mattias Jakobsson, Peter Ebbesen, and Carina M. Schlebusch. "Genetic Affinities among Southern Africa Hunter-Gatherers and the Impact of Admixing Farmer and Herder Populations." Molecular Biology and Evolution 36, no. 9 (2019): 1849–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msz089.
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Abstract Southern African indigenous groups, traditionally hunter-gatherers (San) and herders (Khoekhoe), are commonly referred to as “Khoe-San” populations and have a long history in southern Africa. Their ancestors were largely isolated up until ∼2,000 years ago before the arrival of pastoralists and farmers in southern Africa. Assessing relationships among regional Khoe-San groups has been challenging due to admixture with immigrant populations that obscure past population affinities and gene flow among these autochthonous communities. We re-evaluate a combined genome-wide data set of previously published southern Africa Khoe-San populations in conjunction with novel data from Khoe-San individuals collected in Xade (Central Kalahari Game Reserve, Botswana) prior to their resettlement outside the reserve. After excluding regions in the genome that trace their ancestry to recent migrant groups, the genetic diversity of 20 Khoe-San groups fitted an isolation-by-distance model. Even though isolation-by-distance explained most genetic affinities between the different autochthonous groups, additional signals of contact between Khoe-San groups could be detected. For instance, we found stronger genetic affinities, than what would be explained by isolation-by-distance gene flow, between the two geographically separated Khoe-San groups, who speak branches of the Kx’a-language family (ǂHoan and Ju). We also scanned the genome-wide data for signals of adaptive gene flow from farmers/herders into Khoe-San groups and identified a number of genomic regions potentially introduced by the arrival of the new groups. This study provides a comprehensive picture of affinities among Khoe-San groups, prior to the arrival of recent migrants, and found that these affinities are primarily determined by the geographic landscape.
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Smit, Talita Christine, and J. N. Indongo. "Transformation and African migrants: The conflicting worlds of cultural beliefs and marriage issues in No longer at ease and Chairman of fools." JOURNAL OF ADVANCES IN LINGUISTICS 6, no. 1 (2015): 867–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.24297/jal.v6i1.2887.
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Human beings can be moulded by the geographical location in which they find themselves. Many Africans, just like Obi in No longer at ease and Farai in Chairman of fools, travel overseas for education and better paid jobs. During vacations or upon completion of their studies most of these Africans return home to their families in Africa. Some of them encounter conflicts because they expect the people who remained in Africa to behave in the same way as they behaved in the past. The returnees do not consider that even they themselves have changed and life is not stagnant. Paradoxically, the migrants also seem to expect African societies to operate in exactly the same way as those societies they have been immersed in while overseas. This article presents an investigation of the way African authors depict characters migrating between two continents and how these characters are affected by the conflicting geographical, as well as metaphysical, worlds they live in. In the two novels studied it appears that the differences in cultural beliefs and marriage issues are responsible for the inner and interpersonal conflicts that the main characters experience
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Alfaro-Velcamp, Theresa. "“Don’t send your sick here to be treated, our own people need it more”: immigrants’ access to healthcare in South Africa." International Journal of Migration, Health and Social Care 13, no. 1 (2017): 53–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/ijmhsc-04-2015-0012.
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Purpose Asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants’ access to healthcare vary in South Africa and Cape Town due to unclear legal status. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the source of this variation, the divergence between the 1996 South African Constitution, the immigration laws, and regulations and to describe its harmful consequences. Design/methodology/approach Based on legal and ethnographic research, this paper documents the disjuncture between South African statutes and regulations and the South African Constitution regarding refugees and migrants’ access to healthcare. Research involved examining South African jurisprudence, the African Charter, and United Nations’ materials regarding rights to health and health care access, and speaking with civil society organizations and healthcare providers. These sources inform the description of the immigrant access to healthcare in Cape Town, South Africa. Findings Asylum-seekers and refugees are entitled to health and emergency care; however, hospital administrators require documentation (up-to-date permits) before care can be administered. Many immigrants – especially the undocumented – are often unable to obtain care because of a lack of papers or because of “progressive realization,” the notion that the state cannot presently afford to provide treatment in accordance with constitutional rights. These explanations have put healthcare providers in an untenable position of not being able to treat patients, including some who face fatal conditions. Research limitations/implications The research is limited by the fact that South African courts have not adjudicated a direct challenge to being refused care at healthcare facility on the basis of legal status. This limits the ability to know how rights afforded to “everyone” within the South African Constitution will be interpreted with respect to immigrants seeking healthcare. The research is also limited by the non-circulation of healthcare admissions policies among leading facilities in the Cape Town region where the case study is based. Practical implications Articulation of the disjuncture between the South African Constitution and the immigration laws and regulations allows stakeholders and decision-makers to reframe provincial and municipal policies about healthcare access in terms of constitutional rights and the practical limitations accommodated through progressive realization. Social implications In South Africa, immigration statutes and regulations are inconsistent and deemed unconstitutional with respect to the treatment of undocumented migrants. Hospital administrators are narrowly interpreting the laws to instruct healthcare providers on how to treat patients and whom they can treat. These practices need to stop. Access to healthcare must be structured to comport with the constitutional right afforded to everyone, and with progressive realization pursued through a non – discriminatory policy regarding vulnerable immigrants. Originality/value This paper presents a unique case study that combines legal and social science methods to explore a common and acute question of health care access. The case is novel and instructive insofar as South Africa has not established refugee camps in response to rising numbers of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants. South Africans thus confront a “first world” question of equitable access to healthcare within their African context and with limited resources in a climate of increasing xenophobia.
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Pucherova, Dobrota. "Afropolitan narratives and empathy: Migrant identities in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Sefi Atta’s A Bit of Difference." Human Affairs 28, no. 4 (2018): 406–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/humaff-2018-0033.
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Abstract The article analyzes two novels of migration by Nigerian women authors in the context of Afropolitanism: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013) and Sefi Atta’s A Bit of Difference (2013). It is argued that Afropolitanism obscures the reasons why migration from Africa to the West has been increasing in the decades since independence, rather than decreasing. In comparing the two novels, the article focuses on empathy towards and solidarity between fellow Nigerians, which has been seen by Nigerian philosopher Chielozona Eze as crucial for building African civil society and functional state.
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Toivanen, Anna-Leena. "Cartographies of Paris: Everyday mobilities in Michèle Rakotoson’s Elle, au printemps and Alain Mabanckou’s Tais-toi et meurs." Journal of Urban Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (2019): 59–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/jucs_00003_1.
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Literary representations of postcolonial subjects’ concrete mobility practices beyond migrancy have not received much critical attention. To fill this void, this article analyses the representations and poetics of urban everyday mobilities in two francophone African diasporic novels, Michèle Rakotoson’s Elle, au printemps (1996) and Alain Mabanckou’s Tais-toi et meurs (2012), through a mobility studies perspective. I focus on the protagonists’ use of urban mobility systems and the narratives’ ways of producing urban cartographies as means for inscribing the newly arrived irregular African migrants in the metropolis, and argue that the texts give articulation to a practical cosmopolitanism. The texts’ poetics of mobility – manifest in their uncanny and thrilleresque qualities – and the protagonists’ journeys to peripheral dead-ends convey the anxious aspects of their attempts to claim Paris as their city through mobility.
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Gagiano, A. H. "Two bad-time stories and a song of hope." Literator 23, no. 3 (2002): 161–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/lit.v23i3.348.
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Using three fairly recently published South African texts – David B. Coplan’s In the Time of Cannibals – The Word Music of South Africa’s Basotho Migrants (1994); A.H.M. Scholtz’s Vatmaar – ’n Lewendagge verhaal van ’n tyd wat nie meer is nie (1995) in its English translation, A Place Called Vatmaar (2000) and Mongane (Wally) Serote’s Come and Hope with Me (1994) – this essay looks at the role such texts can play to give public expression to the voices of formerly silenced communities. The essay contends that the deep fissures in South African society require intense efforts in order to make those isolated from one another mutually intelligible. All South Africans need to broaden their cultural vocabularies. This is where texts such as novels and those containing the oral art of neglected communities can function as ‘translations’, and have profound social importance. It can be predicted that rehistoricising writings and culturally recontextualising teaching practices will continue to be required in this country, but also texts that contain the vision of a shared South African future.
Dissertations / Theses on the topic "African Migrant Novel"
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Roy, Vilasini. "New Homes and New Names: The African Migrant Novelin the Digital Age." Thesis, Stockholms universitet, Engelska institutionen, 2016. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-131816.
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In this thesis, I attempt to explore the development of migrant literature in an era of digitalcommunication. The latest developments in communication technology have certainlydestabilized patterns of content creation and dissemination. While many use it uncritically,mostly as a means of information and keeping in contact, there are new avenues open forthose who wish to engage actively and create a space for new dialogue. And though theseonline platforms have not completely overturned hierarchies between literatures from theWest versus the global South, they have certainly altered both the content and form of workoriginating from African countries. By doing so, digital technology has boosted the creationof an African identity that moves away from victimhood by reimagining ideas of what itmeans to be and write from an African perspective where a multiplicity and hybridity ofvoices exist. I have chosen three “digital migrant novels” (Caren Irr’s term): ChimamandaNgozi Adichihe’s Americanah, NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names, and Open Cityby Teju Cole. I begin by situating these novels in a technologically sophisticated, mediaoriented space, where the geography of nations is challenged by overlapping spaces of digitalcommunication. My aim is threefold – to identify new patterns in migrant identity and to seehow they are affected by technology use; to see whether these patterns correspond to theemergence of an Afropolitan identity (and to understand what permutations this Afropolitanidentity can take on). And and finally, to analyse how digital media communication shapes amigrant’s relationship to homeland and language.
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Waberi, Abdourahman Ali. "Fragments d'un discours africain : Approches critique et historique des littératures subsahariennes, francophones et transnationales de 1980 à aujourd'hui." Thesis, Paris 10, 2012. http://bdr.parisnanterre.fr.faraway.parisnanterre.fr/theses/intranet/2012PA100096.pdf.
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Envisagé à travers le prisme de la double conscience, telle qu’elle a été dévoilée par Paul Gilroy , et inscrit dans la période historique qui correspond au discrédit des Indépendances africaines nominales d’une part et à la fin de la politique migratoire en France d’autre part, ce travail interroge les contextes qui ont enfanté des nouvelles expressions littéraires et artistiques, transnationales et diasporiques, issues des Afriques francophones. Ces dernières se caractérisent par d’incessantes reconfigurations qui bousculent le cadre national en Afrique tout en mettant en crise les notions d’appartenance raciale, sociale et politique associées aux générations précédentes portées par le mouvement de la Négritude et les exigences du nationalisme culturel. Ces nouvelles floraisons littéraires, filmiques et plastiques ne quêtent pas l’authentique. Mieux, elles imaginent les voies du futur en donnant à voir – et à sentir – de nouvelles manières de penser, de dialoguer et de vivre ensemble dans notre monde marqué par les errements du capitalisme hégémonique drapé, en Afrique, sous les masques de l’idéologie du développement avec sa cohorte d’ajustements structurels. Enfin, elles soulèvent des questions fondamentales relatives au devenir des populations dites immigrées en France et en Europe, et œuvrent pour l’avènement de nouvelles perspectives plus égalitaires, solidaires et cosmopolites<br>This work is examined through the paradigm of the double consciousness, as it was unveiled by Paul Gilroy, and remains inscribed in the historical period synonymous of the discredit of African independences on one hand and at the end of migration policy in France on the other hand. Besides, it explores the contexts that have given birth to new literary and artistic expressions, transnational and diasporic, coming from Francophone Africa. These new literary and artistic expressions are characterized by constant reconfigurations that challenge the national framework in Africa while seriously questioning the notions of racial, social and policy issues taken care of by previous generations in the name of the Negritude and cultural nationalism. These new literary, cinematographic and visual productions are also powerful ways of imagining the future of our world scarred by the vagaries of the late age of capitalism. Finally, they raise fundamental questions concerning the fate of immigrant populations in France and Europe while heralding the advent of new, more egalitarian, inclusive and cosmopolitan ways of living together
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HŮLA, Marek. "Black Novels on the 20th Century African American Northward Migration/Díla z hlediska afroamerické Northward Migration ve 20. století." Master's thesis, 2016. http://www.nusl.cz/ntk/nusl-381118.
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In my diploma thesis called Black Novels on the 20th Century African American Northward Migration I am going to examine the novel in African American literature with a particular focus on the migration from the South to the North inside the United States following the First World War. At first the work will recapitulate the history of this African American migration - its causes and its effects. The motif of the North as the "promised land" and how, in most cases, migrant characters in these works experienced this form of the "American Dream" myth will be analyzed. Finally, the racism by whites of the South will be compared to the racism by whites in the North.
Books on the topic "African Migrant Novel"
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Schlabach, Elizabeth Schroeder. Kitchenettes. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252037825.003.0005.
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This chapter continues the investigation of the two authors with a comparison of Wright's 1941 photographic essay 12 Million Black Voices and his final literary publication, The Outsider, set in Chicago and Harlem, to Brooks' 1945 collection of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville, and her only novel, Maud Martha (1953). The chapter argues that migration to the city and its unkept promise of freedom left African Americans on Chicago's South Side suspended between two planes of existence. The harshest points of this suspension were the one-bedroom kitchenette apartments that began to burst as more migrants poured into Bronzeville. Through their work, Brooks and Wright illustrates an acute consciousness of the symbiotic relationship between the streets of Bronzeville and opportunities for cultural production.
Book chapters on the topic "African Migrant Novel"
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Breton, Mireille Le. "Rewriting the memory of immigration: Samuel Zaoui’s Saint Denis bout du monde." In Reimagining North African immigration. Manchester University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.7228/manchester/9780719099489.003.0013.
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This article reflects on the memory of North-African immigration in twentieth-century France, and focuses more particularly on the fate of the chibanis, the first generation of immigrants who came from Algeria to work in France during the economic boom of the post WWII era. Grounded in the works of historians of memory Nora and Ricoeur, this chapter analyzes how Samuel Zaoui’s novel Saint Denis Bout du monde portrays first-generation immigrants in a new light. Indeed, moving away from the traditional, largely negative, stories of loss, the novel partakes of new narratives of regaining and repairing, what Susan Ireland calls ‘a kind of Narrative recovery.’ The novel can be read as the story of the forgotten generation, which repairs collective amnesia as it regains memory, in order to reconcile itself with the past. This article goes further to show how a new narrative of reconciliation is able to trigger the shift in the episteme of migrant literature.
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Foster, Christopher Ian. "“We Carry Our Home With Us”." In Conscripts of Migration. University Press of Mississippi, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496824219.003.0004.
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This chapter expands the study of new African diasporic writing beyond Francophone and Anglophone worlds, to important works of African migrant literature in Italy written in Italian. It engages important historical moments including Italian colonialism, the Cold War, neoliberal economic globalization, and the ways in which these destructive histories create destabilization and thus African emigration. The chapter analyzes Somalia as a case study and engages with digital art and documentary film in contemporary Italy as important markers of Afro-Italian migrant cultural production. Through a close reading of Cristina Ali Farah’s novel Little Mother, it delineates not only the pasts of Italian colonialism on the continent, but the ways in which colonial racialized modes of managing movement appear in present-day Italy, particularly since the 1980s.
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Lowney, John. "“Harlem Jazzing”." In Jazz Internationalism. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252041334.003.0002.
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The first chapter concentrates on the fiction of Claude McKay, which explicitly locates jazz expression within intellectual debates about black internationalism. Beginning with consideration of McKay’s Marxist theorizing of black music, this chapter emphasizes the cultural politics of McKay’s first novel, Home to Harlem, which represents “Jazz Age” Harlem as a site of African diasporic interculturalism. Banjo, which had an enormous influence on the Francophone négritude movement in West Africa and the Caribbean, similarly defines Marseilles as an international site of displaced black migrant workers whose common language is the blues and jazz. As novels that reconsider the cultural politics of the Harlem Renaissance from a radical black internationalist perspective, Home to Harlem and Banjo interrogate the commercialization of black cultural expression as they explore the critical possibilities of jazz for the marginalized perspectives of black workers, including cultural workers.
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Foster, Christopher Ian. "The “Condition D’immigrés” in Fatou Diome’s the Belly of the Atlantic and the Aesthetics of Migration in the Francophone African Literary Tradition." In Conscripts of Migration. University Press of Mississippi, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496824219.003.0003.
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Through an analysis of Fatou Diome’s 2010 novel The Belly of the Atlantic, this chapter rethinks Jacques Chevrier’s definition of migritude, which he describes as a recent cohort of African writers in France who narrate existence between Africa and France and for whom immigration and exile are central themes. The chapter argues more narrowly that migritude writers disclose what Diome terms the “condition d’immigres”; that is, they image the conditions and structures of immigration as a national and international network of systems expropriating the means of movement from formerly colonized peoples and that these systems have a colonial past. In addition, it unpacks Diome’s conversations with the Négritude tradition, noting that, at the same time she borrows from her authors, she refashions aspects of Négritude in terms of migration. She reappropriates, for example, Léopold Sédar Senghor’s black humanism, and mobilizes it into her global twenty-first century as a migrant humanism challenging immigration under neoliberal globalization.
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Gray, Billy. "From the Secular to the Sacred: The Influence of Sufism on the Work of Leila Aboulela." In Narratives Crossing Borders: The Dynamics of Cultural Interaction. Stockholm University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.16993/bbj.g.
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The contemporary Sudanese writer Jamal Mahjoub has used the term ’Transcultural’ to describe a specific form of Literature which he argues: demands more, both of reader and writer. It does not have the support of those cheering, waving crowds who would like you to be European or Third World, Black or African or Arab. It can rely only on that crack of light which lies between the spheres of reader and writer. Gradually that crack grows wider and where there was once only monochrome light, now there is a spectrum of colours. (Mahjoub, The Writer and Globalisation 1997) Leila Aboulela, whose first novel The Translator (2000) is a contemporary writer whose fiction has been defined as embodying predominant elements of the transcultural experience. Daughter of a Sudanese father and Egyptian mother, born in Cairo in 1964, Aboulela grew up in Khartoum but currently resides in Aberdeen, Scotland and her fiction is attuned to emerging female Muslim voices within the migrant communities of the West. Aboulela’s experience of Britain and British culture provides her with a terrain against which she attempts to articulate a specific identity: the Muslim Arab/African woman in exile. In her novels, the migrant experience serves as the foundation for a mystical but nonetheless assertive religiosity that functions as an antidote to hegemonic Western materialism. This religious frame offers not merely consolation and a firm sense of identity; it also, according to Geoffrey Nash (2012) ‘shapes an emerging awareness of difference and helps articulate an alternative to Western modernity’. According to Lleana Dimitriu (2014), the last decade has witnessed a resurgence of interest, both theoretical and creative, in the complexities of what she terms ‘faith based subject positions’, particularly in the context of global crises and mass migrations and Leila Aboulela’s fiction suggests that in the midst of postcolonial ruptures and mass migration, there is the possibility of alternative forms of ‘re-rooting’ and belonging, with ‘home’ perceived as a state of mind and identity as anchored in the tenets of religious faith. My article will engage with the manner in which Aboulela is preoccupied with the ethical dilemmas faced by Muslims currently residing in secular societies and how a mystical form of Islam –in particular Sufism – serves less as an ideological marker for her characters and more as a code of ethical behaviour and a central marker of identity.
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Gussow, Adam. "Zora Neale Hurston in the Florida Jooks." In Whose Blues? University of North Carolina Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469660363.003.0008.
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Like W. C. Handy and Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston was a translator: she sought textual analogies—words on a page--for the bittersweet lyricism, dynamism, and bold self-declarations found in blues music made by Black people in the rural South of the early Twentieth Century. She was also, like both men, a migrant to the urban North, a key figure of the Harlem Renaissance. A biographical as well as literary-critical exploration, this chapter focuses on Hurston’s two best-known works: Mules and Men (1935), a folklore study, and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), a cornerstone of the African American literary tradition. Both works vividly evoke the rough but vital blues culture of rural Florida, offering us Black spaces of self-making through the eyes of a Black female participant-observer. Both texts also force readers to confront the presence of scarifying, sometimes deadly violence within that juke-joint world. Hurston, this chapter argues, uses the novel to rewrite the folklore study, offering us a questing and indomitable young woman, Janie Crawford, who earns her way into the blues and lives out her destiny with the help of Tea Cake, a passionate, adventurous, and mercurial young bluesman.
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Sadowski-Smith, Claudia. "The Post-Soviet Diaspora in Comparative Perspective." In New Immigrant Whiteness. NYU Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479847730.003.0006.
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This chapter analyzes additional data from my interviews with post-Soviet immigrants and Gary Shteyngart’s novel Super Sad True Love Story (2010) in order to outline connections between post-USSR, Latina/o, and Asian American migration. In the interviews, post-Soviet migrants largely stressed their ambivalence toward laws like Arizona’s 2010 Senate Bill 1070 that target undocumented migration and from which they expected exemption because of their differential modes of entry. Because of their shared status as immigrants or experiences with state surveillance in the USSR or in post-Soviet nations, however, interviewees also expressed empathy with Mexican immigrants as the group most targeted by the law. While these views are reminiscent of turn of the twentieth century European immigrants’ insistence on their differences from nonwhite contemporaries, they also recall eastern European Jewish immigrants’ ambivalence toward or rejection of white supremacy through empathy with African Americans because of their own marginalization in the Russian empire. Set in a dystopian United States that is undergoing similar neoliberal shock therapies as the former Soviet Union, Shteyngart’s novel draws attention to parallels between second-generation Russian Jewish immigrants and Asian Americans, who are similarly associated with upward mobility, while Latina/os and African Americans are considered losers in the neoliberal era.
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Allen, Nicholas. "The Maritime Yeats." In Ireland, Literature, and the Coast. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198857877.003.0002.
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The imagery of water runs through all of Yeats’s writing, from the Sligo of his youth to the Byzantium of his old age, just as sea travel was a constant factor in his migrant life. From the beginning he understood the world in which he grew up as coastal and maritime, and Yeats’s writing about Ireland is watermarked with the diverse cultures that he experienced first-hand, in libraries and in archives, the past and the present joined in an archipelagic network of signs and associations that stretched from the west of Ireland to the Mediterranean, Africa, and Asia. This chapter describes the fluid declension of water in Yeats’s poetry and prose overall, with a focus on his early novel John Sherman.
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Maxwell, William J. "Consciousness of FBI Ghostreading Fills a Deep and Characteristic Vein of African American Literature." In F.B. Eyes. Princeton University Press, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691130200.003.0006.
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This part argues that Afro-modernist literature “pre-responded” to FBI inspection, internalizing the likelihood of Bureau ghostreading and publicizing its implications with growing bluntness and embellishment over the years from 1919 to 1972 and beyond. Thus, the fifth and last of the book's five theses, and the one that finally involves closer encounters with black poems, stories, essays, and novels than with their silhouettes in FBI files: Consciousness of FBI ghostreading fills a deep and characteristic vein of African American literature. Section 1 examines decisive responses to FBI surveillance in both the early journalism and the foundational poetry of the Harlem movement. Section 2 charts the FBI's migrant status in Afro-modernism from the mid-1930s through the early Cold War. Section 3 focuses on the expatriate trio of Richard Wright, William Gardner Smith, and Chester Himes, and their interlocking fictions of Paris noir in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Section 4 widens its focus, owing to the profusion of black Bureau writing in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The final section sketches African American literature's less heated skirmish with the FBI after Hoover's death—a skirmish now led by black women including Ai, Audre Lorde, Danzy Senna, and Gloria Naylor.
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Bernier, Celeste-Marie, Alan Rice, Lubaina Himid, and Hannah Durkin. "‘Safety and danger and how to tell the difference’: Suffering, Struggle and Survival in Plan B (1999)." In Inside the invisible. Liverpool University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781789620856.003.0008.
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‘In 1997 I began to work on a series which was exhibited at Tate St Ives in 1999/2000 – Plan B. The work brought out the theme of safety and danger and how to tell the difference’, Lubaina Himid writes of this series which is the subject of this chapter. ‘What is better, to be stuck in what looks to the outside world to be a safe place but is in fact [a] dangerous place, for ever’, she asks, ‘or to venture into what is a dangerous place but have the free will to find safety’. Debating issues related to physical and psychological confinement versus liberation for African diasporic peoples fighting to survive the prejudices and persecutions of white supremacist western nations, Himid took inspiration for her title for this series from African American writer Chester B. Himes’s ‘violent’ unfinished novel Plan B, published posthumously in 1993. As per his provocative narrative in which the US nation functions as the quintessential ‘dangerous place’ for Black people trying to survive against all odds, she confirms that ‘[t]he paintings recall terrifying experiences related through desperate narratives across the centuries by runaway slaves, escaping hostages, fleeing migrants, bombed communities and battered women’. As the protagonists in Himes’s novel face life-and-death situations, so Himid argues, ‘The work exposes the dilemma of deciding whether to endure the dangers of a current violent situation or risk life-threatening events during the process of escape’. Working beyond Himes’s subject matter to destabilise temporal boundaries and interrogate competing historical contexts, Himid dramatises the tragedies and traumas experienced by ‘runaway slaves, escaping hostages, fleeing migrants, bombed communities and battered women’. She represents and reimagines narratives of slavery and freedom, memories of war and peace and testimonies of domestic and national violence. Himid uses this series to ask and answer a question: ‘Is the inside you know more dangerous to you than the outside you don’t know?’ Here she comes to terms not solely with the corporeal wounding but with the emotional suffering facing past, present and future Black diasporic peoples as a catalyst for her – and by extension their – radical formulation of a new ‘Plan B’ in which she and they endorse radical practices of resistance and revolution.