Chapter 17 - The Embodied Feminist Futures of Diaspora

Summary

What has the Black feminine body meant to literary study? What might it mean in the twenty-first century? This essay argues that African diaspora feminist literary study has often been contained by national boundaries and prescribed readings of the feminine subject “stuck” in masculinist routes and plots. Instead, this chapter turns to the materiality of the body in the work of African feminist writers and artists such as Theresa Ikoko, T. J. Dema, and Wangechi Mutu. The chapter shows how their work moves the labor of constructing, perceiving, and living through feminine embodied experience to the center of theories of diaspora. Focusing on poetry, drama, and visual art, this chapter pushes against the novel’s centrality in formulating theories of the self, nation, and diaspora identity in the field. This body of new writing and expressive culture that centers on the material body offers new routes for feminist diaspora literature and its futures across continents, genres, and contexts.