Afropean female selves : migration and language in the life writing of Fatou Diome and Igiaba Scego / Christopher Hogarth.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hogarth, Christopher, author.

Series:

Routledge Auto/Biography Studies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Emigration and immigration in literature.

European literature.

Women authors.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (197 pages)

Place of Publication:

New York, New York ; London : Routledge, [2023]

Summary:

Afropean Female Selves: Migration and Language in the Life Writing of Fatou Diome and Igiaba Scego examines the corpus of writing of two contemporary female authors. Both writers are of African descent, live in Europe and write about lives across Europe and Africa in different languages (French and Italian). Their work involves episodes from their lived experience and complicates Western understandings of life writing and autobiography. As Hogarth shows in this study, the works of Diome and Scego encapsulate the new and complex identities of contemporary "Afropeans". As an identity coined and used frequently by prominent authors and critics across Europe, Africa and North America, the notion of "Afropean" is at the cutting edge of cultural analyses today. Yet each writer occupies unique and different positions within this debated category. While Scego is a "post-migratory subject" in postcolonial Europe, Diome is an African writer who has migrated to Europe in her adult life. This book examines the different trajectories and packaging of these two specific postcolonial writers in the Francophone and Italophone contexts, pointing out how and where each author practices life writing strategies and scrutinizing the trend that emphasizes the life writing, autofictional, or autoethnographic strategies of African diasporic writers. Afropean Female Selves offers a comparative study across two languages of a notion that has so far been explored mainly in English. It explores the contours of this new discursive category and positions it in regard to other notions of Afrodiasporic identity, such as Afropolitan and Afro-European.

Contents:

Cover

Half Title

Series Information

Title Page

Copyright Page

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Afropean By Any Other Name? Categorizing African and European Cultural Connections

Strategically Conflated Categories? Migrant Writing and Afro-Italian Literature as New Discursive Categories in Italian ...

French and Francophone Afropeans? Generational Diversity Within a Category in France

Notes

References

1 Life Writing and Writing Lives

"Salie, C'est Moi?": Fatou Diome's Fiction and Life Writing

Igiaba Scego: Afropean Writing and Writing Africans in Italy

2 Afropean Homes: Representations of Belonging

Fatou Diome's Afropean Women: From Economic to Refuge-Seeking Migrants

Scego's Afropeans: Unpacking Generational Belonging

3 Gender and Migration: Opportunities for Afropean Experience

Who Are the Female Afropeans? Women and Mobility in Celles Qui Attendent

Women Telling the Story of (Afropean?) Migration

Diome's Alternative Afropean Families

Male Mobility Versus Female Stasis: The Gendered Availability of Afropean Experience

Nomadic Helpers: Female Enablement of Migration in Igiaba Scego

4 Language and Afropean Identity

Igiaba Scego: "Letteratura Della Migrazione," "Italophone" Literature and Marketing of the Multilingual Migrant Text

Fatou Diome's Translingual Writing: A Peculiar Form of Linguistic Inclusivity

French and the Language Question in Postcolonial Senegal

French and Vernacular Languages in Fatou Diome's Translingual Imagination

5 Writing and Engagement

Afropean Engagement: A Burden of Commitment?

Igiaba Scego: Editing as Commitment

Scego's Memoir: Life Writing, Commitment and Pedagogy

Engagement and Decolonizing.

Fatou Diome: Engagement and Renewed Notoriety

Commitment and Popularity: Recent Packaging of Diome and Scego

Conclusions

Conclusion: Afropean Languages and Locales

The European Language(s) of Afropeans

Brazen, But With Some Borders

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-00-320385-X

1-000-77003-6

1-003-20385-X

1-000-77008-7