Dokument: Beyond the Bildungsroman: Feminist Negotiations of the African Diaspora

Titel:	Beyond the Bildungsroman: Feminist Negotiations of the African Diaspora
Weiterer Titel:	Beyond the Bildungsroman: Feminist Negotiations of the African Diaspora
URL für Lesezeichen:	https://docserv.uni-duesseldorf.de/servlets/DocumentServlet?id=61338
URN (NBN):	urn:nbn:de:hbz:061-20221130-134848-7
Kollektion:	Dissertationen
Sprache:	Englisch
Dokumententyp:	Wissenschaftliche Abschlussarbeiten » Dissertation
Medientyp:	Text
Autor:	Rond, Kathrin [Autor]
Dateien:	[Dateien anzeigen] Adobe PDF [Details] 2,43 MB in einer Datei [ZIP-Datei erzeugen] Dateien vom 25.11.2022 / geändert 25.11.2022
Beitragende:	Prof. Dr. Winnett, Susan [Gutachter] Prof. Dr. Curdts, Soelve I. [Gutachter]
Stichwörter:	Bildungsroman, diaspora novel, African diasporic, transnational feminism, Paule Marshall, Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Dewey Dezimal-Klassifikation:	800 Literatur » 820 Englische, altenglische Literatur
Beschreibung:	Mapping the development of a canon of explicitly feminist and transnational African diasporic literature in a U.S. context, this dissertation examines how the works of Paule Marshall, Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie deliberately set out to modify or even completely transform the concept of a global African diaspora and challenge the reader to consider the possible political consequences of these transformations, especially with regard to possible alliances between traditionally distinct groups. It demonstrates that each author’s contribution to this ongoing reconceptualization can best be analyzed and interpreted by reading their novels as rhizomatically connected and in dialogue with one another. I suggest that, even though Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari did not have female diasporic experiences in mind when they first formulated their ideas, rhizomatic structures and rhizomatic thinking are needed for two reasons: They enable one to productively engage with novels that challenge traditional distinctions between ‘national literature’ and ‘diaspora literature’ as well as between ‘African American’ and ‘postcolonial literature.’ And they allow one to combine and adapt approaches taken from different fields and develop a theoretical and interpretative framework that accounts for the specific characteristics and nuances of the emerging canon of African diaspora literature in a U.S. context. Paul Gilroy’s notion of a “determinedly non-traditional tradition” (Gilroy 1996: 22) aptly describes the kind of tradition and canon that the novels discussed in this study establish, since these novels consciously destabilize and thereby politicize notions of individual and national identity and belonging. This dissertation has no stake in redefining the Bildungsroman. Rather the concept of the Bildungsroman is employed as a heuristic tool that enables one to group together and compare each author’s ‘female (ethnic) Bildungsroman’ in order to then analyze how and why the negotiation of the African diaspora concept in feminist and transnational terms begun in the female (ethnic) Bildungsromane can be continued in an appropriately and sufficiently complex manner only by leaving the Bildungsroman genre behind and turning to what I have termed the African diaspora novel. Discursively maintaining but simultaneously modifying key insights regarding the African diaspora, these novels do not represent a singular, normative African diaspora experience. Foregrounding the political potentialities of being or conceiving of oneself as diasporized, their representations of life in the African diaspora underscore the heterogeneity and asymmetries of these experiences, while simultaneously seeking to reveal and establish commonalities and continuities within a shared experiential and imaginative field. Their dual trajectory also allows the novels to explore the limits of the comparability of experiences as well as the limits of relationality based on ‘race’ and gender. Since the alliances sought and established in these novels do not rely on essentialist conceptions of identity and belonging, they problematize earlier conceptualizations of the African diaspora along generational family lines or as an essentialist family formation in which diasporic Africans were commonly represented as having been ripped from ‘Mother Africa.’ Emphasizing their (feminist) investments in the transformation of the present and the future, these novels demonstrate that in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries the concept of a global African diaspora retains relevance and viability only if it finds ways to also accommodate those diaspora experiences that cannot easily be accounted for within what Michelle Wright describes as the “Middle Passage epistemology” (Wright 2015: 14). This dissertation shows that rather than merely exploring how gender inflects diaspora experiences, the novels under discussion advocate that transnational feminism offers additional possibilities to form new alliances within the African diaspora. I argue that the imperfections of the African diaspora concept can also be regarded as its most significant strengths. Unwieldy, contested and ultimately without a fixed definition, the stand-in ‘umbrella term’ African diaspora functions as a ‘performative’ term whose ambivalence and indeterminacy draw attention to its own constructedness and openness. The novels under discussion call on those who use it to keep asking those difficult questions about belonging, exclusion and applicability.
Lizenz:	Dieses Werk ist lizenziert unter einer Creative Commons Namensnennung 4.0 International Lizenz
Fachbereich / Einrichtung:	Philosophische Fakultät » Anglistisches Institut
Dokument erstellt am:	30.11.2022
Dateien geändert am:	30.11.2022
Promotionsantrag am:	27.06.2018
Datum der Promotion:	18.07.2018