Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers

Contemporary African American and Black British Women Writers: Narrative, Race, Ethics brings together British and American scholars to explore how, in texts by contemporary black women writers in the U. S. and Britain, formal narrative techniques express new understandings of race or stimulate ethical thinking about race in a reader. Taken together, the essays also demonstrate that black women writers from both sides of the Atlantic borrow formal structures and literary techniques from one another to describe the workings of structural racism in the daily lives of black subjects and to provoke readers to think anew about race. Narratology has only recently begun to use race as a category of narrative theory. This collection seeks both to show the ethical effects of narrative form on individual readers and to foster reconceptualizations of narrative theory that account for the workings of race within literature and culture.

Jean Wyatt is a Professor of English at Occidental College, USA. Sheldon George is a Professor of English at Simmons University, USA.

Introduction: Narrative Theory and Contemporary Black Women Writers Jean Wyatt and Sheldon George Part 1: African American Women Writers: Narrative Form, Race, Ethics Chapter 1. At the Crossroads of Form and Ideology: Disidentification in Claudia Rankine's Citizen Catherine Romagnolo, Professor of English, Lebanon Valley College, USA Chapter 2. "She was miraculously neutral": Feeling, Ethics and Metafiction in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah Jennifer Terry, Associate Professor of English, Durham University, UK Chapter 3. Ableism and the Reproduction of Racial Difference in Nella Larsen's Passing and Toni Morrison's "Recitatif" Milo Obourn, Associate Professor of English, Brockport State University, USA Chapter 4. "When We Speak of Otherness": Narrative Unreliability and the Ethics of Othering in Toni Morrison's Jazz and Home Herman Beavers, Professor of English and Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania, USA Chapter 5. Learning to Listen in Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing Stephanie Li, Professor of English, Indiana University Bloomington, USA Chapter 6. Maternal Sovereignty: Destruction and Survival in Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the BonesNaomi Morgenstern, Associate Professor of English and American Literature, University of Toronto, Canada Chapter 7. Narrating the Raced Subject: Toni Morrison's Jazz and the Literature of Modernism Sheldon George, Professor of English, Simmons University, USA Part 2: Black British Women Writers: Narrative Form, Race, Ethics Chapter 8. Swing Time: Zadie Smith's Aesthetic of Active Ambivalence Daphne Lamothe, Associate Professor Africana Studies, Smith College, USA Chapter 9. Zadie Smith's Narratives of the Absurd: A Social Vision Represented through Humor Sarah Ilott, Lecturer in English and Film, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK Chapter 10. Buchi Emecheta: Storyteller, Sociologist, and Citizen of the World Pamela Bromberg, Professor of English, Simmons University, USA Chapter 11. "Where are you (really) from?" Transgender ethics, ethics of unknowing, and transformative adoption in Jackie Kay's Trumpet and Toni Morrison's Jazz Pelagia Goulimari, English, University of Oxford, UK Chapter 12. White Allyship and Narrative Dissonance in Andrea Levy's Small Island Agata Szczeszak-Brewer, Professor of English, Wabash College, USA Chapter 13: "Civis Romana sum": Bernardine Evaristo's The Emperor's Babe and the Emancipatory Poetics of (Multi-) Cultural Citizenship Deirdre Osborne (Reader in English Literature, Goldsmiths, University of London) Chapter 14. Reinventing the Gothic in Oyeyemi's White is for Witching: Maternal Ethics and Racial Politics Jean Wyatt, Professor of English, Occidental College, USA