Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic Women’s Writing

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-x

   PDF

2. Introduction: Be/longing

   • Jennifer Leetsch

   Pages 1-20

3. Routes of Desire: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

   • Jennifer Leetsch

   Pages 21-74

4. London Lovers: Zadie Smith

   • Jennifer Leetsch

   Pages 75-136

5. Longing Elsewhere: Helen Oyeyemi

   • Jennifer Leetsch

   Pages 137-198

6. Opening Wor(l)ds: Warsan Shire and Shailja Patel

   • Jennifer Leetsch

   Pages 199-259

7. Coda: “Dreaming of a yet unwritten future”

   • Jennifer Leetsch

   Pages 261-270

8. Back Matter

   Pages 271-282

   PDF

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.

• Critical love studies
• Globalization
• Migration
• Refugee movements
• Black feminist writers
• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• Zadie Smith
• Helen Oyeyemi
• Shailja Patel
• Warsan Shire
• Digital media
• Affect
• Global imaginary
• Postcolonial literature

 “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

• Department of English Literature and British Cultural Studies, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany

  Jennifer Leetsch

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.

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