Difficult Diasporas

Samantha Pinto is Associate Professor of English and Affilated Faculty of Women's and Gender Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, the Warfield Center for African American Studies, and LGBTQ Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Difficult Diasporas: The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic (2013), which won the 2013 William Sanders Scarborough Prize for African American Literature and Culture from the MLA.

• Acknowledgments Introduction: The Feminist Disorder of Diaspora 1 The World and the "Jar": Jackie Kay and the Feminist Locations of the African Diaspora 2 It's Lonely at the Bottom: Elizabeth Alexander, Deborah Richards, and the Cosmopolitan Poetics of the Black Body 3 The Drama of Dislocation: Staging Diaspora History in the Work of Adrienne Kennedy and Ama Ata Aidoo 4 Asymmetrical Possessions: Zora Neale Hurston, Erna Brodber, and the Gendered Fictions of Black Modernity5 Intimate Migrations: Narrating "Third World Women" in the Short Fiction of Bessie Head, Zoe Wicomb, and Pauline Melville 6 Impossible Objects: M. NourbeSe Philip, Harryette Mullen, and the Diaspora Feminist Aesthetics of Accumulation Coda: The Risks of Reading Notes References Index

"Difficult Diasporas charts a dazzlingly fecund constellation of black feminist literature by Anglophone writers from the US, the UK, the Caribbean, and Africa. Pinto reads an archive of & stray companions, a disparate array of writers linked less by influence, lineage, or geography than an adamant contention that the only literature adequate to the historical dislocation of diaspora is a literature that is formally dislocateda literature of radical experimentation, even opacity and disorder. Poised at the crossroads between literary innovation and transnational culture, Difficult Diasporas will be known as a model of what it means to read for a feminist poetics of diaspora." - Brent Hayes Edwards,author of The Practice of Diaspora "There are lessons to be learned from this study." (The Journal of African American History) "The central idea of Samantha Pintos Difficult Diasporasis simple in a good way and worthy of pursuit." (Wasafiri) "By illustrating carefully the core contradictions of diaspora that fail to address problems of representation and nonnormative experiences for black women adequately and critically, Pinto provides an important and necessary venue to place gender at the center of aesthetic and formal representations of diaspora." (Contemporary Women's Writing) "In its richness of content and advancement of the fields of African diaspora and feminist studies,Difficult Diasporasproves that such risks can yieldgroundbreaking scholarship." (Gender, Place, & Culture)