Dialogues across Diasporas

Marion Rohrleitner is an assistant professor of English and affiliate faculty in the Women’s Studies and African American Studies Programs at the University of Texas at El Paso, where she teaches 20th and 21st century American, Chicana/o and Latina/o, Caribbean, and African diasporic literatures. Her articles, book chapters, and book reviews have appeared in American Quarterly, Antípodas: A Journal of Hispanic and Galician Studies, Callaloo, El Mundo Zurdo, Interdisciplinary Humanities, and Latino Studies. Her first book, Diasporic Bodies: Contemporary Historical Fictions and the Intimate Public Sphere, is a finalist for the ICI manuscript competition at Vanderbilt University. Sarah E. Ryan is an empirical research librarian at the Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale University. She is an M.L.S. candidate at Texas Woman’s University, and holds an M.A. in Interpersonal Communication, Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies, and Ph.D. in Rhetorical Criticism from Ohio University. Sarah has published extensively on the topics of good governance and community rebuilding in Rwanda, including a 2012 article in the Loyola University Chicago Law Journal entitled “Fulfilling the U.S. obligation to prevent exterminationism: A comprehensive approach to regulating hate speech and dismantling systems of genocide.” She has also published in: Contemporary Argumentation & Debate, Journal of Development Communication, Journal of Public Affairs Education, Peace Review, Review of Communication, Women & Language, and in a variety of edited collections and working papers series.

• PrefaceIntroductionPart 1: Diasporic Debates: Exploring the Dynamics of Gender, Race, and MigrationChapter 1: ‘Harvesting’ Port-au-Prince, Haiti: Zora Neale Hurston’s Literary (Dis)Articulation of Being, Myriam J.A. ChancyChapter 2: Not in Our Mother’s Image: Ekphrasis and Challenges to Recovering Afro-Mestizaje in Contemporary Latina/Chicana Historical Fiction, Marion RohrleitnerChapter 3: Male Wives, Female Husbands: Immigration, Gender and Home in Calixthe Beyala’s “Le Petit Prince de Belleville and Maman a un Amant”, Ayo Abiétou ColyChapter 4: Embodied Translation: Dominant Discourse and Communication with Migrant Bodies-as-Text, Karma R. ChávezPart 2: Diasporic Dances: Performing Language, History, and CommunityChapter 5: in tongues–the trouble inside language. Imag[e]ining presence, Olumide PopoolaChapter 6: A Freedom Stolen, Yvette ChristiansëChapter 7: Reading Yvette Christiansë: Reflections from a Border Scholar Activist, Kathleen StaudtChapter 8: Pin-Stripe Alley, Nelly Rosario

A stunning and unique contribution in the field of Africana Studies. Includes eloquent and highly readable work by female creative writers, community activists, and scholars of the African diaspora from Africa, Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean region, and the United States. Notably, this collection not only emerged from a two-day symposium in El Paso del Norte in 2010, but from where a majority of the nineteen contributors presently live and work, or have had past experiential contact with the U.S. Mexico borderlands. This book expands the horizons of interdisciplinary and intersectional scholarship in the already established areas of American-, Woman-, and Cultural Studies.