Pan-African American literature : signifyin(g) immigrants in the twenty-first century /

Pan-African American literature : signifyin(g) immigrants in the twenty-first century /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:	Li, Stephanie, 1977- author.
Imprint:	New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, [2018]
Description:	vii, 186 pages ; 24 cm
Language:	English
Subject:	American literature -- African American authors -- History and criticism. African diaspora in literature. Blacks -- Race identity -- America. African Americans in literature. Blacks in literature -- 21st century. African Americans in literature. African diaspora in literature. American literature -- African American authors. Blacks in literature. Blacks -- Race identity. America. Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Format:	Print Book
URL for this record:	http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/11719117

Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:	9780813592770 0813592771 9780813592787 081359278X 9780813592794
Notes:	Includes bibliographical references (pages 177-182) and index.
Summary:	"The fast-changing contours of the African diaspora in the United States demand that we establish new ways of understanding black identity in the twenty-first century. Twenty-First Century Pan-African American Literature takes up writings by African born or identified authors like Teju Cole, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dinaw Mengestu, and NoViolet Bulawayo. Stephanie Li asserts that these texts reinvent the meaning of blackness by placing immigration and diasporic identity at the center of their narratives, and reassessing the relationship between slavery and contemporary social conditions. The texts studied demonstrate the ways in which race is an evolving and contested site of identity that is made new by the experiences of recent African immigrants; they also show how blackness becomes a bridge between people of radically different experiences. Though race often alienates and frustrates immigrants who are accustomed to living in all-black environments, Li holds that it can also be a powerful form of community and political mobilization"--

Table of Contents:

Signifyin(g) on the slave narrative: African memoirs of war and displacement
Uncanny rememories in Teju Cole's open city
The impossibility of invisibility in the novels of Dinaw Mengestu
Refiguring the ancestor in the fiction of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Becoming his own father: 0bama's dreams from my father
Conclusion: blackness now.