Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Black Women, Writing, and Identity is a salient examination of black women's writing and the politics of subjectivity and identity. Emerging out a critical need to situate black women's writing in a cross-cultural perspective, Carole Boyce Davies investigates critically the complexities, the contradictions, and the constraints which both determine and displace the black women writer's identity. Treating such issues as locationality and naming, Carol Boyce Davies produces a remarkably imaginative and acutely exciting discussion of the what she uniquely terms the migratory subject.
Davies follows the migratory subject through the works of such authors as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston and Maya Angelou. She looks at issues such as temporality and memory, and representation and identity, constantly negotiating the tensions that frame the differences between the fields of black women's writing and African-American women's writing. Davies carefully and cleverly and autiobiographically examines these shifts in canonicity, subjectivity, and identity, and, in the end, produces a significant contribution to debate about race, writing and identity in the academy and out of it.
Synopsis
Black Women Writing and Identity is an exciting work by one of the most imaginative and acute writers around. The book explores a complex and fascinating set of interrelated issues, establishing the significance of such wide-ranging subjects as:
* re-mapping, re-naming and cultural crossings
* tourist ideologies and playful world travelling
* gender, heritage and identity
* African women's writing and resistance to domination
* marginality, effacement and decentering
* gender, language and the politics of location
Carole Boyce-Davies is at the forefront of attempts to broaden the discourse surrounding the representation of and by black women and women of colour. Black Women Writing and Identity represents an extraordinary achievement in this field, taking our understanding of identity, location and representation to new levels.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 198-222) and index.