Overview
- Combines careful literary analyses with in-depth discussions of cultural and socio-historical contexts by considering the world-making powers of the old novel form in the third millennium as well as the formative effect of new digital media.
- Foregrounds literature's ability to engage with the harmful as well as the reparative results that come to be produced at the intersections of love, migration and globalization.
- Activates various African diasporic literatures in concert with one another, thus suggesting a newly connected global imaginary
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing (PSCWW)
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About this book
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.
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Keywords
Table of contents (6 chapters)
Reviews
“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) ‘This finger-on-the-pulse book draws together an exciting line-up of contemporary African diasporic women writers – Nigerian-American, Caribbean, Nigerian-British, Somali-British, and Kenyan-American. Attending to affect and intimacy as much as diasporic longing, this sparkling study provides sharp literary and theoretical insights in equal measure.’— Isabel Hofmeyr, Professor of African Literature, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and Global Distinguished Professor, New York University, USA
'Bringing together affect studies with postcolonial theories of migration, displacement, and globalization, Jennifer Leetsch forcefully argues for the power of love in celebrated fictions by the most important African diaspora women writers today. Her meticulous and engaging readings of contemporary literature make a formidable case for how fiction can remake the world we live in to create space for better futures.'
— Yogita Goyal, Professor of English and African American Studies, UCLA, USA
'Bringing together affect studies with postcolonial theories of migration, displacement, and globalization, Jennifer Leetsch forcefully argues for the power of love in celebrated fictions by the most important African diaspora women writers today. Her meticulous and engaging readings of contemporary literature make a formidable case for how fiction can remake the world we live in to create space for better futures.'
— Yogita Goyal, Professor of English and African American Studies, UCLA, USA
Authors and Affiliations
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.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic Women’s Writing
Book Subtitle: Making Love, Making Worlds
Authors: Jennifer Leetsch
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67754-1
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-67753-4Published: 17 July 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-67756-5Published: 18 July 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-67754-1Published: 16 July 2021
Series ISSN: 2523-8140
Series E-ISSN: 2523-8159
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: X, 282
Topics: Contemporary Literature, Literary Theory, African Literature, Literature, general, Comparative Literature