Ernest Ernest Cole - Böcker

Using close readings of nine novels by African or African-descended novelists, this book examines three phases of African migration: departure, disillusionment and the impulse to return.The experiences of African migrants in the diaspora are deeply inflected by the condition of living as Black bodies in white spaces. In this work, author Ernest Cole examines closely the narratives of migration and return presented in nine powerful novels by authors who include Chimamanda Adichie, NoViolet Bulawayo, Teju Cole and others. The novels reveal a reversal of expectations that migrants from Africa experience upon arrival in the West, a reversal prompted in part by the racial prejudice they are confronted with as Black individuals. As the author notes, the novels also illustrate the desire to return to the homeland as a better alternative to the precarious life in the West, even though such a move is not without its complications.The study is divided into three parts with seven chapters. The first two chapters deal with the reasons for the departure of migrants from the continent, the next two depict the experiences of migrants in the West, and the last three focus on contemplations of the return journey home. Collectively, the chapters lay out three phases in the migration process: departure from home, disillusionment in the West, and return to the country of origin. Within this framework, the book uses displacement and dislocation to examine a host of themes—social alienation, alterity and the precarity of Africans in the diaspora.

What are Sierra Leonean and diaspora authors writing about today? What genres are they working in? What are future possibilities and directions of travel?The ethnically and linguistically diverse nation of Sierra Leone boasts a rich cultural legacy and, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, has built an internationally recognized literary canon despite the ravages caused by a brutal civil war and then the Ebola and Covid pandemics. While acknowledging the country's literary and creative heritage dating back to the mid-twentieth century, this book interrogates a number of prominent themes and critical perspectives on Sierra Leone's contemporary literature.Drawing from body studies, post-colonial theory, spatial theory, trauma theory, ecocriticism, history, and cultural studies, scholars and writers from West Africa and the United States tease out the beginnings, ecology, and dynamism of a bona fide national literature. They do so through a careful examination of such themes as social oppression and class distinction, dystopia, ethnocentricity, homophobia, misogyny and gender disparities, anthropocentrism, self-discovery, social transformation, identity, social degradation, genocide, and trauma, while also theorizing constructs such as home, migration, displacement, community, and return. Throughout, contributors argue for a better appreciation of a vibrant national literature by Sierra Leoneans themselves as well as its place in and contribution to world literature more generally.