In what innovative ways do novels by diasporic Black women writers experiment with the representation of Black subjectivity? This collection explores the inventiveness of contemporary Black women writers - Black British, African, Caribbean, African American - who remake traditional understandings of blackness. As the title word "experimental" signals, these essays foreground the narrative form and stylistic innovations of the black-authored novels they analyze. They also show how these experiments with form mirror the novels' convention-breaking experiments with reimagining Black female subjectivities.
While each novel, of course, represents the complexities of diasporic experiences differently, some issues emerge that are broadly shared not just within a regional group, but across geographical borders. One feature of the collection is a comparative look at such linking themes across borders, under the rubrics: a return to precolonial systems of belief, reinventions of mothering, relational subjectivities, memory, history and haunting, and posthumanist revaluations. These themes take different shapes across the multitude of diverse cultures studied in this book. But together they establish a pan-global imaginative practice.
George, Sheldon: - Sheldon George is Professor and Chair of Literature & Writing at Simmons University, USA. He is author of Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity (2016), coeditor, with Derek Hook, of Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity and Psychoanalytic Theory (2021), and coeditor, with Jean Wyatt, of Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form (2020).
Gustar, Jennifer: - Jennifer Gustar is an Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan, Canada. She is an Associate Member of the Gender and Women's Studies Program. Her research currently focusses on contemporary women writers, with special interest in writers of diaspora. She is North American reviews editor for Contemporary Women Writers and has published on a range of women fiction writers such as Anita Rau Badami, Bernardine Evaristo, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Zadie Smith, and Elizabeth Knox.
Mulvey-Roberts, Marie: - Professor Marie Mulvey-Roberts is Professor of English Literature at the University of the West of England, UK. She is the author of Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal (MUP, 2016), winner of the Alan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prize. She has authored, edited and co-edited over 30 books. This will be her third edited book on Angela Carter. Recently she made a film on Carter's The Bloody Chamber for Massolit, for use in schools (33,000 downloads). She was the co-curator of the Strange Worlds exhibition on Angela Carter at the Royal West Academy of Art in Bristol 2017 and co-edited the catalogue. She is the co-founder of Women's Writing, for which she serves as Editor and runs two Carter websites with Charlotte Crofts.
Wyatt, Jean: - Jean Wyatt is Professor Emeritus of English at Occidental College, USA. Her previous publications include Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels (2017) and, with Sheldon George, she edited Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers (2020). Her articles include: "Freud, Laplanche, Leonardo: Sustaining Enigma" American Imago (2019); "Reinventing the Gothic in Helen Oyeyemi's 'White is for Witching': Maternal Ethics and Racial Politics," in Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers; "Dislocating the Reader: Slave Motherhood and the Disrupted Temporality of Trauma in Toni Morrison's Beloved," in The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis (ed.Vera Camden, 2022); and "Mirror Mirror: The Visual Economy of Race in Helen Oyeyemi's Boy, Snow, Bird," and "Alter Egos in Nella Larsen's Passing and Helen Oyeyemi's Boy, Snow, Bird: Race and Dissociation" for Angelaki.
