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.

Is conflict inherent to the politics of borders? Recent global events, erupting from national, religious, class, racial and gender boundaries would suggest it is. From the inhumanity of post-Brexit British immigration policy to the violent suppression of women's freedom in Iran, to Russia's territorial invasion of Ukraine, and most immediately to the violent conflagration engulfing Palestine, border hostilities seem everywhere characterised by fearful and toxic intolerance of what is deemed other. This book examines the writing of award-winning European novelists to suggest an alternative perspective, one that redresses time-sanctioned hierarchies of mind over body, of ideals over physical reality. It explores novelistic representations of power, war, sacrifice, heroism, national history and identity, all issues more conventionally viewed within a male consensus. The fiction offers a cultural and imaginative response to border conflicts of all kinds, ethical, bodily, religious, and geographical, often drawing upon the writers' own personal experience of threatening divisions. Examining works by Virginia Woolf, Jenny Erpenbeck, Olga Tokarczuk, Herta Müller, Anna Burns, Chika Unigwe, Maylis de Kerangal, Magda Szabó, Elena Ferranti, Alki Zei, Elif Shafak, and Oksana Zabuzhko, it uses an integrated interdisciplinary approach to combine literary readings with detailed historical and political understanding of cultural context. Coming from many different cultures and histories, these writers speak a common condemnation of all hierarchies of worth and of exceptionalist identities whether sanctified by religion, nature, or tradition. Morris shows how their stories, read here in translation, also articulate a strikingly unified vision of a radical ecological understanding of human relations based on physical continuity and co-existence rather than borders dividing an idealised 'us' from a denigrated 'them'.

"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 official publication of the Division on Black American Literature and Culture of the Modern Language Association of America, African American review promotes an exchange among writers and scholars in the arts, humanities, and social sciences who hold diverse perspectives of African American literature and culture.

Envisioning new directions for an inclusive anthropology

Vols. for 1969- include ACTFL annual bibliography of books and articles on pedagogy in foreign languages 1969-