BOOK NEWS: Black immigrant fiction's rebellious daughters

 Against! Rebellious Daughters in Black Immigrant Fiction in the United States

BY ASHA JEFFERS

Ohio State UP, 2025

ISBN: 978-0-8142-5933-7

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215791.html

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.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

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.

“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 K.M. 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

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.

Book News: Afro-futurist Women

The Postapocalyptic Black Female Imagination

BY MAXINE LAVON MONTGOMERY

Bloomsbury Academic, 2021

ISBN: 9781350124509

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/postapocalyptic-black-female-imagination-9781350124509/

Exploring postapocalypticism in the Black literary and cultural tradition, this book extends the scholarly conversation on Afro-futurist canon formation through an examination of futuristic imaginaries in representative twentieth and twenty-first century works of literature and expressive culture by Black women in an African diasporic setting.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

The author demonstrates the implications of Afro-futurist literary criticism for Black Atlantic literary and critical theory, investigating issues of hybridity, transcending boundaries, temporality, and historical recuperation.

Covering writers including Octavia Butler, Edwidge Danticat, Nalo Hopkinson, Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, and Beyoncé, this book examines the ways Black women artists attempt to recover a raced and gendered heritage, and how they explore an evolving social order that is both connected to and distinct from the past.

Maxine Lavon Montgomery is professor of English at Florida State University. Her recent publications include The Fictions of Gloria Naylor (2011) and, as editor, Conversations with Edwidge Danticat (2017).

Book News: Sexual policing in Hemispheric American Literature

Policing Intimacy: Law, Sexuality, and the Color Line in Twentieth-Century Hemispheric American Literature

BY JENNA GRACE SCIUTO

UP of Mississippi, 2021

ISBN 9781496833440 Hardcover

ISBN 9781496833457 Paperback

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/P/Policing-Intimacy

In Policing Intimacy: Law, Sexuality, and the Color Line in Twentieth-Century Hemispheric American Literature, author Jenna Grace Sciuto analyzes literary depictions of sexual policing of the color line across multiple spaces with diverse colonial histories: Mississippi through William Faulkner’s work, Louisiana through Ernest Gaines’s novels, Haiti through the work of Marie Chauvet and Edwidge Danticat, and the Dominican Republic through writing by Julia Alvarez, Junot Díaz, and Nelly Rosario. This literature exposes the continuing coloniality that links depictions of US democracy with Caribbean dictatorships in the twentieth century, revealing a set of interrelated features characterizing the transformation of colonial forms of racial and sexual control into neocolonial reconfigurations.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

A result of systemic inequality and large-scale historical events, the patterns explored herein reveal the ways in which private relations can reflect national occurrences and the intimate can be brought under public scrutiny. Acknowledging the widespread effects of racial and sexual policing that persist in current legal, economic, and political infrastructures across the circum-Caribbean can in turn bring to light permutations of resistance to the violent discriminations of the status quo. By drawing on colonial documents, such as early law systems like the 1685 French Code Noir instated in Haiti, the 1724 Code Noir in Louisiana, and the 1865 Black Code in Mississippi, in tandem with examples from twentieth-century literature, Policing Intimacy humanizes the effects of legal histories and leaves space for local particularities. By focusing on literary texts and variances in form and aesthetics, Sciuto demonstrates the necessity of incorporating multiple stories, histories, and traumas into accounts of the past.

Jenna Grace Sciuto is associate professor of English at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. Her work examines the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in circum-Caribbean literature.