Against!: Rebellious Daughters in Black Immigrant Fiction in the United States
Autor Asha Jeffersen Limba Engleză Paperback – 10 ian 2025
Against! is the first book-length study of Afro-Caribbean and African immigrant and second-generation writing in the United States. In it, Asha Jeffers evaluates the relationship between Blackness and immigranthood in the US as depicted through the recurring theme of rebellious Black immigrant daughters. Considering the work of Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Taiye Selasi, Jeffers untangles how rebellion is informed by race, gender, ethnicity, and migration status. Immigrant and second-generation writers mobilize often complicated familial relationships to comment on a variety of political, social, and psychic contexts. Jeffers argues that rather than categorizing Black migrants as either immediately fully integrated into an African American experience or seeing them as another category altogether that is unbound by race, Marshall, Danticat, Adichie, and Selasi identify the unstable position of Black migrants within the American racial landscape. By highlighting the diverse ways Black migrants and their children negotiate this position amid the dual demands of the respectability politics imposed on African Americans and the model-minority myth imposed on immigrants, Jeffers reveals the unsteady nature of US racial categories.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814259337
ISBN-10: 0814259332
Pagini: 160
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
ISBN-10: 0814259332
Pagini: 160
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Recenzii
“Against! balances a necessary critique of families invested in the turning of their offspring into status and profit with a necessary empathy for those ancestors who, themselves, had been so ruthlessly made. Jeffers’s affect work theorizes pain without being fueled by it, able to evade the sentimental and anti-sentimental traps common to symptomatic readings. This is important scholarship and bold literary criticism.” —erin Khuê Ninh, author of Passing for Perfect: College Impostors and Other Model Minorities
“Against! makes a significant intervention into gender studies and diasporic literature and redirects the conversation around Caribbean American fiction. Jeffers demonstrates how rebellious immigrant daughter characters push back against ‘respectability’ and organize their subjectivity within and against model-minority discourse.” —Angeletta KM Gourdine, author of The Difference Place Makes: Gender, Sexuality, and Diaspora Identity
“Jeffers offers a theoretically engaged yet accessible presentation of how four diasporic novels explore their African and Afro-Caribbean protagonists’ rebellions against the familial, racial, geographical, cultural, and gendered vortexes that threaten their individuality. Jeffers’s multilayered, densely crafted analysis sets itself apart from the prevailing, stereotypically racial and gendered discussions of four dynamic women writers. This provocative text engagingly advances conversations around—and scholarship of—novels about African and Afro-Caribbean women’s experiences in their ancestral homelands and the diaspora.” —Joyce A. Joyce, author of Black Studies as Human Studies: Critical Essays and Interviews
Notă biografică
Asha Jeffers is Associate Professor of English and Gender and Women’s Studies at Dalhousie University. Her research focuses on literature about the children of immigrants across national and ethnic lines. She is coeditor of The Daughters of Immigrants: A Multidisciplinary Study.
Extras
Intergenerational conflict is a common theme in immigrant fiction in general and is no less present in texts situated in the African diaspora. The ruptures that result from migration are particularly visible in the relationship between the generation who migrated and the one who was born or raised in the “elsewhere” to which the first arrived. Immigrant and second-generation writers mobilize these often-complicated familial relationships to comment on a variety of political, social, and psychic contexts. In particular, the prevalence of daughters who push back against patriarchal social and familial structures including gendered and classed expectations of behavior suggests that writers find this figure a particularly fruitful one through which they can examine how migration reshapes social relations. This book identifies the distinct but interconnected discourses of respectability and the model minority as the primary manifestation of these expectations and as the structures that characterize social relations in the afterlife of migration.
While the theme of familial conflict has been recognized and written about extensively in studies of Asian and Latina immigrant fiction, it has garnered less attention in studies of the African diaspora, a context that is significantly inflected by the way that race in general and Blackness specifically are constructed in the United States. This gap in the scholarship is reflective of the overall lower emphasis on the familial in studies of the African diaspora, which perhaps speaks to the different way that African diasporic migrants are conceptualized more broadly: as solo sojourners, willing or unwilling, who lack strong family bonds. Yet the cultural production belies this view, showing Caribbean and African migrants to be enmeshed, sometimes much more than they would like, in meaningful and complex familial bonds and networks. An examination of these bonds and networks in all their ambivalence offers literary scholars the opportunity to shift away from an atomized view of the Black migrant to a more nuanced, psychologically rich understanding of migration and its aftereffects for members of the African diaspora, particularly women and girls.
This book is primarily concerned with “daughter” as a social position—a child who is defined by those around her by her dependence on caregivers and her designation as female and is socialized during her coming-of-age in ways that are shaped by these factors. As such, the focus is on those assigned female at birth. While these girls and women do not always conform to gendered expectations, the female characters I write about in this project are cisgender. Exploring the themes of this book through narratives about transgender girls or nonbinary people assigned female at birth would be a rich addition to this area of inquiry, though it is beyond the scope of this project.
Over the course of four chapters, I examine the fiction of Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat, Taiye Selasi, and Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie in order to analyze how each text represents the figure of the rebellious daughter, whether an immigrant herself or the daughter of immigrants, and how this rebellion is informed by race, gender, ethnicity, and migration status. Spanning Marshall’s 1959 novel Brown Girl, Brownstones through Danticat’s 1994 novel Breath, Eyes, Memory to Selasi’s and Adichie’s 2013 novels Ghana Must Go and Americanah, this book traces the literary representation of the rebellious Black immigrant daughter across over fifty years and examines texts that depict continental African and Afro-Caribbean immigrant groups.
By engaging with novels that depict the coming-of-age of the daughters of Black immigrants, I trace how their protagonists’ subject formation relates to their adherence to or rebellion against familial, cultural, or national expectations in order to consider what the intersections of migration, racialization, and gender construction can tell us about each of these processes, especially as they converge in the immigrant family. I argue that Black immigrant and second-generation American women writers produce work that recognizes the specificity of African and African-diasporic immigrant experiences without deracinating them. That is, rather than categorizing Black migrants as either immediately fully integrated into an African American experience or seeing them as another category altogether that is unbound by race, these writers identify the unstable position of Black migrants within the American racial landscape. As such, these literary texts undermine racially essentialist readings of Black American experience and offer an excellent opportunity to trace the contours of the relationship between Americanization and racialization.
While the theme of familial conflict has been recognized and written about extensively in studies of Asian and Latina immigrant fiction, it has garnered less attention in studies of the African diaspora, a context that is significantly inflected by the way that race in general and Blackness specifically are constructed in the United States. This gap in the scholarship is reflective of the overall lower emphasis on the familial in studies of the African diaspora, which perhaps speaks to the different way that African diasporic migrants are conceptualized more broadly: as solo sojourners, willing or unwilling, who lack strong family bonds. Yet the cultural production belies this view, showing Caribbean and African migrants to be enmeshed, sometimes much more than they would like, in meaningful and complex familial bonds and networks. An examination of these bonds and networks in all their ambivalence offers literary scholars the opportunity to shift away from an atomized view of the Black migrant to a more nuanced, psychologically rich understanding of migration and its aftereffects for members of the African diaspora, particularly women and girls.
This book is primarily concerned with “daughter” as a social position—a child who is defined by those around her by her dependence on caregivers and her designation as female and is socialized during her coming-of-age in ways that are shaped by these factors. As such, the focus is on those assigned female at birth. While these girls and women do not always conform to gendered expectations, the female characters I write about in this project are cisgender. Exploring the themes of this book through narratives about transgender girls or nonbinary people assigned female at birth would be a rich addition to this area of inquiry, though it is beyond the scope of this project.
Over the course of four chapters, I examine the fiction of Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat, Taiye Selasi, and Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie in order to analyze how each text represents the figure of the rebellious daughter, whether an immigrant herself or the daughter of immigrants, and how this rebellion is informed by race, gender, ethnicity, and migration status. Spanning Marshall’s 1959 novel Brown Girl, Brownstones through Danticat’s 1994 novel Breath, Eyes, Memory to Selasi’s and Adichie’s 2013 novels Ghana Must Go and Americanah, this book traces the literary representation of the rebellious Black immigrant daughter across over fifty years and examines texts that depict continental African and Afro-Caribbean immigrant groups.
By engaging with novels that depict the coming-of-age of the daughters of Black immigrants, I trace how their protagonists’ subject formation relates to their adherence to or rebellion against familial, cultural, or national expectations in order to consider what the intersections of migration, racialization, and gender construction can tell us about each of these processes, especially as they converge in the immigrant family. I argue that Black immigrant and second-generation American women writers produce work that recognizes the specificity of African and African-diasporic immigrant experiences without deracinating them. That is, rather than categorizing Black migrants as either immediately fully integrated into an African American experience or seeing them as another category altogether that is unbound by race, these writers identify the unstable position of Black migrants within the American racial landscape. As such, these literary texts undermine racially essentialist readings of Black American experience and offer an excellent opportunity to trace the contours of the relationship between Americanization and racialization.
Cuprins
Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Against! Chapter 1 Rebelling in the In-Between Chapter 2 Rebelling against Repetition Chapter 3 Self-Destructive Rebellion Chapter 4 Rebelling against Stereotypes and Confinement Conclusion The Future of Immigrant Blackness Works Cited Index
Descriere
Evaluates how texts by Afro-Caribbean and African US-based women writers address the recurring theme of rebellious immigrant daughters to reconsider the relationship between Blackness and immigranthood in the US.