Changing the subject : writing women across the African diaspora

Resource Information

The work Changing the subject : writing women across the African diaspora represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Missouri Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Changing the subject : writing women across the African diaspora

Title remainder

writing women across the African diaspora

Statement of responsibility

K. Merinda Simmons

Creator

• Simmons, Merinda, 1981-

Author

• Simmons, Merinda, 1981-

Subject

• American literature -- African American authors | History and criticism
• American literature -- African American women | History and criticism
• Collective memory in literature
• African American women in literature
• Slave trade in literature
• West Indian literature (English) -- Women authors | History and criticism
• Culture in literature
• African Americans in literature

Language

eng

Summary

In Changing the Subject: Writing Women across the African Diaspora, K. Merinda Simmons argues that, in first-person narratives about women of color, contexts of migration illuminate constructions of gender and labor. These constructions and migrations suggest that the oft-employed notion of 2authenticity3 is not as useful a classification as many feminist and postcolonial scholars have assumed. Instead of relying on so-called authentic feminist journeys and heroines for her analysis, Simmons calls for a self-reflexive scholarship that takes seriously the scholar{u2019}s own role in constructing the subject. The starting point for this study is the nineteenth-century Caribbean narrative The History of Mary Prince (1831). Simmons puts Prince{u2019}s narrative in conversation with three twentieth-century novels: Zora Neale Hurston{u2019}s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Gloria Naylor{u2019}s Mama Day, and Maryse Condé{u2019}s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. She incorporates autobiography theory to shift the critical focus from the object of study{u2014}slave histories{u2014}to the ways people talk about those histories and to the guiding interests of such discourses. In its reframing of women{u2019}s migration narratives, Simmons{u2019}s study unsettles theoretical certainties and disturbs the very notion of a cohesive diaspora. --Provided by publisher

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

810.9/928708996073

Government publication

government publication of a state province territory dependency etc

Index

index present

LC call number

PS374.N4

LC item number

S45 2014

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography