Global Black Women’s Writing: Experimental Subjectivities
Intersectional Humanities Programme's Workshop series
Workshop 4: Thursday 23 March 2023, 3-5pm UK time
Workshop convenors: Pelagia Goulimari (pelagia.goulimari@ell.ox.ac.uk), Sheldon George (sheldon.george@simmons.edu) and Jean Wyatt (jwyatt@oxy.edu).
Speakers:
Pelagia Goulimari (English Faculty, University of Oxford, UK)
Naomi Morgenstern (University of Toronto, Canada)
Denise Decaires-Narain (University of Sussex, UK)
Milo Obourn (SUNY Brockport, US)
Sheldon George (Simmons University, Boston, US)
Presentations:
Desire Beyond the Limits of Sanity: A Lacanian reading of Toni Morrison’s Paradise
Sheldon George (Simmons College, US)
Holding – Shedding: Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater, Toni Morrison and Celestine Chukwuemeka Mbaegbu
Pelagia Goulimari (English Faculty, University of Oxford, UK)
“Is Your Mother Well?” Touch and the Racialized Maternal Subject in Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif” and Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild.”
Naomi Morgenstern (University of Toronto, Canada)
Putting a self together: author, subject, character in the fictions of Kincaid, Brand and Evans
Denise Decaires-Narain (University of Sussex, UK)
A Critical Disability Analysis of Gender Expansive Black Motherhood in Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts
Milo Obourn (SUNY Brockport, US)
In what inventive ways do novels by global black women writers experiment with the representation of black subjectivity? This set of four workshops will feature fourteen scholars of contemporary global literature who explore the inventiveness of black women writers from Britain, the Caribbean, Africa and the U.S. Presenters will focus on authors such as Jesmyn Ward, Toni Morrison, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Paulina Chiziane, Nalo Hopkinson, Bernardine Evaristo and Helen Oyeyemi. Through attention to the narrative form and stylistic innovations of such authors, presenters will explore how black women writers reshape the formal structure of their novels and pioneer different styles of narration in their efforts to depict the lives, histories and subjective realities of the racialized subjects represented by their characters. Presentations will display the revolutionary content and stylistic innovations deployed by contemporary black women writers in their efforts to make readers confront and even change their fixed ideas about racialized subjects.
For more information please email intersectionalhumanities@torch.ox.ac.uk.
Find out more about the Intersectional Humanities Programme here.
