Leila Sebbar, The Vagabond (original) (raw)

2014, Jadaliyya http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/17111/the-vagabond

Middle Passage Narratives: Flight, Loss and Resistance

2018

This paper focuses on the various strategies contemporary Diasporic female writers explore in order to textualize the memory of oblivion, void and failure engendered by the dismemberment of the Middle Passage.The process of re-appropriating and rewriting history is surely not new to women writers of African descent. In the context of neo-slave narratives, the necessity to claim history has already been advanced by women writers such as Toni Morrison or Margaret Walker whose texts produced meaning that demystified the unique official reading called History; thus their stories turned into “Herstory”1. However, to diasporic women writers who must deal with their ambivalent position of insiders/outsiders, retelling “herstory” takes a much deeper meaning, which implies voicing resistance, re-imagining roots and routes, and challenging prevailing discourses of power. Fabienne Kanor, Edwidge Danticat aptly illustrate the (de)-constructive poetics of putting back fragments and voids into a ...

Loading...

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.