Experimental Subjectivities in Global Black Women's Writing

Jean Wyatt is Professor Emeritus of English at Occidental College, USA. Her previous publications include Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison’s Later Novels (2017) and, with Sheldon George, she edited Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers (2020). Her articles include: “Freud, Laplanche, Leonardo: Sustaining Enigma” American Imago (2019); "Reinventing the Gothic in Helen Oyeyemi’s 'White is for Witching': Maternal Ethics and Racial Politics,” in Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers; “Dislocating the Reader: Slave Motherhood and the Disrupted Temporality of Trauma in Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” in The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis (ed.Vera Camden, 2022); and “Mirror Mirror: The Visual Economy of Race in Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird,” and “Alter Egos in Nella Larsen’s Passing and Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird: Race and Dissociation” for Angelaki.Sheldon George is Professor of Africana Studies at University of Massachusetts, Boston. His scholarship focuses on race and racism through a study of culture, literature and theory. George is an associate editor of Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society and chair of the MLA Executive Committee for the forum, Psychology, Psychoanalysis and Literature. He is author of Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity (2016); co-editor, with Derek Hook, of Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity, and Psychoanalytic Theory (2021); and co-editor, with Jean Wyatt, of Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form (2020).

The book we’ve been wanting on narrative experimentation and black diaspora women’s writing.

• Introduction: Experimentation and Subjectivity in Global Black Women’s Novels: Jean Wyatt and Sheldon GeorgePart One Contemporary African Women Writers: Uganda, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Nigeria1 “There Are Things You Don’t Need to Be Told. You Suckle Them at Your Mother’s Teat”: Dynamic Subjectivity, Breastfeeding, and Storycrafting in The First Woman by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi: Jenni Ramone2 “This One Here Is Not Me”: Decolonizing Female Subjectivities in Paulina Chiziane’s Niketche: Uma história de poligamia: Dorothée Boulanger3 Zimbabwean Decolonization and Colonial Education: Ubuntu (Hunhu) in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s The Book of Not: Brendon Nicholls4 Holding—Shedding: Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater, ToniMorrison’s Beloved, and Celestine Chukwuemeka Mbaegbu’s Igbo Metaphysics: Pelagia GoulimariPart Two Contemporary African American Women Writers5 Constructing Black Women’s Interiorities in Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Angelyn Mitchell6 Writing (Against) Abjection in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing: Claudine Raynaud7 “Is Your Mother Well?”: Touch and the Racialized Maternal Subject in Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif ” and Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild”: Naomi Morgenstern8 “Are You Now So Deluded You Think You Exist Outside the Category of Everything?”: A Posthumanist Critical Disability Analysis of Black Motherhood Beyond Cisgenderism in Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts: Milo Obourn9 Desire Beyond the Limits of Sanity: Subjectivity and Psychic Spatiality in Toni Morrison’s Paradise: Sheldon GeorgePart Three Contemporary Caribbean Women Writers10 Authoring Selfhood: Experiments in Self-Making in Jamaica Kincaid, Dionne Brand and Diana Evans: Denise deCaires Narain11 From “Half ” to “Half,” or the Question of Being in Alecia McKenzie’s Sweetheart: Andrée-Anne Kekeh-Dika12 Imagining a Past/Future Self: Tan-Tan in Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber: Rhonda D. FrederickPart Four: Contemporary Black British Women Writers13 Disorienting Subjectivity: Spatial Relations and Yoruba Themes in Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl: Jean Wyatt14 Welcoming Familiars: Memory Work in Bernardine Evaristo’s Fiction: Jennifer Gustar15 “An Unexpected Turn”: Coincidence and Community in Aminatta Forna’s Happiness: Helen Cousins