Experimental Subjectivities in Global Black Women’s Writing: Race and Narrative Innovation

In what innovative ways do novels by diasporic Black women writers experiment with the representation of Black subjectivity? This collection explores the inventiveness of contemporary Black women writers - Black British, African, Caribbean, African American - who remake traditional understandings of blackness. As the title word ＂experimental＂ signals, these essays foreground the narrative form and stylistic innovations of the black-authored novels they analyze. They also show how these experiments with form mirror the novels’ convention-breaking experiments with reimagining Black female subjectivities.

While each novel, of course, represents the complexities of diasporic experiences differently, some issues emerge that are broadly shared not just within a regional group, but across geographical borders. One feature of the collection is a comparative look at such linking themes across borders, under the rubrics: a return to precolonial systems of belief, reinventions of mothering, relational subjectivities, memory, history and haunting, and posthumanist revaluations. These themes take different shapes across the multitude of diverse cultures studied in this book. But together they establish a pan-global imaginative practice.

Jean Wyatt is Professor Emeritus of English at Occidental College, USA. Her previous publications include Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison’s Later Novels (2017) and, with Sheldon George, she edited Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers (2020). Her articles include: ＂Freud, Laplanche, Leonardo: Sustaining Enigma＂ American Imago (2019); ＂Reinventing the Gothic in Helen Oyeyemi’s ’White is for Witching’: Maternal Ethics and Racial Politics,＂ in Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers; ＂Dislocating the Reader: Slave Motherhood and the Disrupted Temporality of Trauma in Toni Morrison’s Beloved,＂ in The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis (ed.Vera Camden, 2022); and ＂Mirror Mirror: The Visual Economy of Race in Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird,＂ and ＂Alter Egos in Nella Larsen’s Passing and Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird: Race and Dissociation＂ for Angelaki.

Sheldon George is Professor and Chair of Literature & Writing at Simmons University, USA. He is author of Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity (2016), coeditor, with Derek Hook, of Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity and Psychoanalytic Theory (2021), and coeditor, with Jean Wyatt, of Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form (2020).