Women's Friendships in Contemporary Diasporic Fiction

This book examines how women writers of colour, specifically those situated within Anglophone diasporic contexts, have played a significant role in the rewriting of women's friendships in literature, mainly by dismantling romanticised views of women as ‘kindred spirits’ or ‘sisters’ and of women's sociability as a primarily private affair. Through an interdisciplinary framework based on philosophical, sociological, and literary criticism, the book approaches the concept of women’s friendship as a broad and flexible relational framework that encompasses diverse forms of female bonding. These relations are simultaneously personal, rooted in mutual affection and the situated knowledge of the other, and political, insofar as they acknowledge and interrogate the systems of power that naturalise antagonism, competition, and hierarchy between women. Foregrounding the intersecting axes of race, class, sexuality, culture, and nationality, among others, the book explores the conditions under which women form friendships in contemporary Anglophone contexts shaped by patriarchal, imperial, and neoliberal power structures, and the forms of solidarity and resistance that these connections nonetheless enable.