Difficult diasporas : the transnational feminist aesthetic of the Black Atlantic / Samantha Pinto.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction : the feminist disorder of the diaspora -- The world and the "jar" : Jackie Kay and the feminist locations of the African diaspora -- It's lonely at the bottom : Elizabeth Alexander, Deborah Richards, and the cosmopolitan poetics of the Black body -- The drama of dislocation : staging diaspora history in the work of Adrienne Kennedy and Ama Ata Aidoo -- Asymmetrical possessions : Zora Neale Hurston, Erna Brodber, and the gendered fictions of Black modernity -- Intimate migrations : narrating "third world women" in the short fiction of Bessie Head, Zo Wicomb, and Pauline Melville -- Impossible objects : M. Nourbese Philip, Harryette Mullen, and the diaspora feminist aesthetics of accumulation -- Coda : the risks of reading.

Print version record.

In this comparative study of Black Atlantic women writers, the author demonstrates the crucial role of aesthetics in defining the relationship between race, gender, and location. Thinking beyond national identity to include African, African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Black British literature, this book brings together an archive of twentieth-century texts marked by their break with conventional literary structures. These understudied resources mix genres, as in the memoir/ethnography/travel narrative Tell My Horse by Zora Neale Hurston, and eschew linear narratives, as illustrated in the book-length poem by M. Nourbese Philip, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks. Such an aesthetics, which protests against stable categories and fixed divisions, both reveals and obscures that which it seeks to represent: the experiences of Black women writers in the African Diaspora.

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