Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form

Description

Contemporary African American and Black British Women Writers: Narrative, Race, Ethics brings together British and American scholars to explore how, in texts by contemporary black women writers in the U. S. and Britain, formal narrative techniques express new understandings of race or stimulate ethical thinking about race in a reader. Taken together, the essays also demonstrate that black women writers from both sides of the Atlantic borrow formal structures and literary techniques from one another to describe the workings of structural racism in the daily lives of black subjects and to provoke readers to think anew about race. Narratology has only recently begun to use race as a category of narrative theory. This collection seeks both to show the ethical effects of narrative form on individual readers and to foster reconceptualizations of narrative theory that account for the workings of race within literature and culture. Cover Half Title Series Title Copyright Contents Introduction: Narrative Theory and Contemporary Black Women Writers Part 1 African American Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form 1 At the Crossroads of Form and Ideology: Disidentification in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen 2 “She Was Miraculously Neutral”: Feeling, Ethics and Metafiction in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah 3 Disabling Racial Economies: Ableism and the Reproduction of Racial Difference in Nella Larsen’s Passing and Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif” 4 “When We Speak of Otherness”: Narrative Unreliability and the Ethics of Othering in Toni Morrison’s Jazz and Home 5 Learning to Listen in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing 6 Maternal Sovereignty: Destruction and Survival in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones 7 Narrating the Raced Subject: Toni Morrison’s Jazz and the Literature of Modernism Part 2 Black British Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form 8 Swing Time: Zadie Smith’s Aesthetic of Active Ambivalence 9 Zadie Smith’s Narratives of the Absurd: A Social Vision Represented through Humor 10 Buchi Emecheta: Storyteller, Sociologist and Citizen of the World 11 “Where Are You (Really) From?” Transgender Ethics, Ethics of Unknowing, and Transformative Adoption in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet and Toni Morrison’s Jazz 12 White Allyship and Narrative Dissonance in Andrea Levy’s Small Island 13 “Civis Romana Sum”: Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe and the Emancipatory Poetics of (Multi-) Cultural Citizenship 14 Reinventing the Gothic in Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching: Maternal Ethics and Racial Politics Notes on Contributors Index