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More than four decades after its founding, the Journal of Modern Literature remains a leading scholarly journal in the field of modern and contemporary literature and is widely recognized as such. It emphasizes scholarly studies of literature in all languages, as well as related arts and cultural artifacts, from 1900 to the present. International in its scope, its contributors include scholars from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceana, and South America.

Showing posts with label immigration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label immigration. Show all posts

Thursday, February 13, 2025

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.


Tuesday, May 28, 2024

BOOK NEWS: How mid-century authors sought to prevent policies of expulsion

Writing Against Expulsion in the Post-War World: Making Space for the Human

BY DAVID HERD



Oxford UP, 2023

ISBN: 9780192872258

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/writing-against-expulsion-in-the-post-war-world-9780192872258


Writing Against Expulsion in the Post-War World: Making Space for the Human tells a pre-history of the Hostile Environment. The book's starting point is the rapidly escalating use of detention as a response to human movement and the global production of geopolitical non-personhood in which detention results. As a matter of urgency, the book argues, we need to understand what is at stake in such policies and to resist the world we are making when we detain and expel. Writing Against Expulsion returns to a post-war period when the brutal consequences of the politics of expulsion were visible and when it was clear to writers of all kinds that space for the human had to be made.

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.

Drawing on contemporary histories of forced displacement, eye witness accounts, international legal documents, and on a range of emblematic cross-disciplinary texts and authors — the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt, the poetry of Charles Olson, the revolutionary theory of Frantz Fanon — the book shows how mid-century writers both documented the lived experience of expulsion and asserted ways of thinking and acting by which expulsion could be prevented. What emerged were new languages of rights and recognition — new accounts of Moving, Making and Speaking — through which the exclusions of nation and border could be countered.

"Writing Against Expulsion is one of those books that arrives in the world and immediately feels necessary. David Herd asks and brilliantly answers two questions about the condition of unwelcome migrants and the UK government: 'how did we get here' and 'how do we move away from where we are?' Drawing on and building from the works of writers such as Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, the poet Charles Olson, as well as his own work with Refugee Tales, Herd re-casts conversations around 'political non-persons' to allow space for imagination, humanity and truth. A profound and inspiring book." -- Kamila Shamsie, author of Home Fire

"Writing Against Expulsion in the Post-War World is a lucid and compelling report on the individual at the mercy of the bureaucracy of immigration control, `the geo-political non-person`, and how the condition of this figure relates to the aftermath of the 1939-45 War and the subsequent moment of decolonisation. It takes us through the political, philosophical and literary contexts with fluency, passion and rigour. Its engagement with the texts through which the argument progresses is extensive and thoroughly persuasive, and allows the reader to witness the personal journey Herd himself travelled in understanding the issues that are the subject of this wonderful and important book." -- Abdulrazak Gurnah, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021


David Herd is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose, including All Just, described by the Los Angeles Review of Books as "one of the few truly necessary works of poetry written on either side of the Atlantic in the past decade," and Walk Song, a Book of the Year in the Australian Book Review. He has given readings and lectures in Europe, North America, India, and Australia and held visiting fellowships at George Mason University, Simon Fraser University, and the Gloucester Writers Center. He is professor of poetry at the University of Kent and co-organizer of the project Refugee Tales.