Zitationsvorschlag
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Dieses Werk steht unter der Lizenz Creative Commons Namensnennung - Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen 4.0 International.
Identifier (Buch)
Veröffentlicht
Beyond ‘Victim Diaspora(s)’: Post-Soul, the Afropolitan, and Aesthetic Solidarity in Contemporary Anglophone (Im)migrant Novels
ABSTRACT The African diaspora’s image of a “victim diaspora” (Robin Cohen) is a legacy of transatlantic slavery and colonialism imposed on its descendants and often delimits reference frames for examining Afrodiasporic migratory experiences (Goyal). However, contemporary anglophone Afrodiasporic writers adopt a liberated aesthetic stance from which they expand such bounded and narrow views. Aesthetic reframing done by these scholars includes the Afropolitan (Selasi) and post-soul/postblack aesthetic (Ashe). The itineraries of these new migrants focus on individual portraits to give faces to the faceless and often single narrative (Adichie) of African migration. They foster nuanced readings and forms of agencies through aesthetic liberation and via material and immaterial mobilities and migration in literary texts. This chapter examines how contemporary anglophone immigrant novels re-negotiate and recast multidirectional mobilities and foreground “frictions” of mobility (Cresswell) and inequalities of agency from which fresh understandings of solidarity, agency, and identity emerge.
KEYWORDS African diaspora, aesthetic solidarity, agency, immigrant narrative, mobility
