Mobilities and Cosmopolitanisms in African and Afrodiasporic Literatures

ISBN-13: 9789004546738 / Angielski

Anna-Leena Toivanen

Opis

In Mobilities and Cosmopolitanisms, Anna-Leena Toivanen combines mobilities research, postcolonial literary studies, and theories of cosmopolitanism to explore the representations and often complex intertwinements of different mobility practices and cosmopolitanisms in contemporary Franco- and Anglophone African and Afrodiasporic literary texts.

Spis treści

Acknowledgements

Introduction
1 Mobility and Cosmopolitanism: Complex Relations, Shortcomings, and Unease
2 Mobilities, Representation, and the Literary Form
3 Outline of the Book and Chapter Summaries

PART 1
Trouble in the Business Class

1 Anxious Mobilities of Afropolitans avant la lettre Ama Ata Aidoo's Changes: A Love Story
1 Automobility: Undecidedness in the Streets of Accra
2 Hotels as In-between Spaces
3 Transnational Business Class Travel: Afropolitans avant la lettre
4 Conclusion: Freedom of Movement?

2 The Hotel as a Space of Transit in Sefi Atta's and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Short Stories
1 Atta's Hotel: A Chronotope of Hypermobility, Inequality, and Unbelonging
2 Adichie's Hotel Room: Adulterous Space between the Domestic and the Public
3 Conclusion: Being in Transit, Longing for Home

3 Uneasy 'Homecoming' in Alain Mabanckou's Lumi è res de Pointe-Noire
1 Returnee: A Tourist-Native
2 Nostalgia and Loss
3 Returned Gazes, Unbalanced Dialogues
4 Blind Spot behind the Camera: La blanche
5 Conclusion: Problematics of a Business Class Return

PART 2
Budget Travels, Practical Cosmopolitanisms

4 New Technologies and Communication Gaps in Novels by Liss Kihindou, V é ronique Tadjo, NoViolet Bulawayo, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
1 Formal Matters: The Mobile Poetics of Communication Technologies
2 Technological Advances - From Letters to Email and Skype
3 Creating Distance: Communication Gaps
4 Conclusion: Ruptured Dialogues and Unbalanced Cosmopolitanisms

5 Everyday Urban Mobilities in Mich è le Rakotoson's Elle, au printemps and Alain Mabanckou's Tais-toi et meurs
1 Cartographies of Paris
2 Débrouillardise Cosmopolitanism: Survival in a New Environment
3 Peripheral Dead Ends
4 Conclusion: Managing the Metropolis through Mobility

6 European Peripheries and Practical Cosmopolitanism in Fabienne Kanor's Faire l'aventure
1 Peripheries and the Dream of "la grosse Europe "
2 Débrouillardise Cosmopolitanism: Limits and Potentials
3 Conclusion: Out of Reach? Centres and Cosmopolitan Ideals

PART 3
Abject Travels of Citizens of Nowhere

7 Failing Border Crossings and Cosmopolitanism in Brian Chikwava's Harare North
1 Cosmopolitanism as an Active Engagement
2 Instances of Anti-cosmopolitanism
3 Non-dialogue and Linguistic Nonconformity
4 Parodying the Afropolitan
5 Abject Unbelonging
6 Conclusion: Cosmopolitanism's Breakdown

8 Arrested Clandestine Odysseys in Sefi Atta's "Twilight Trek" and Marie NDiaye's Trois femmes puissantes
1 Erased Identities
2 Tropes of Mobility: Shoes, Trucks, and Boats
3 Sand and Sea: The Slavery Parallel
4 Conclusion: Precarious Journeys

9 Zombie Travels
J. R. Essomba's Le Paradis du nord and Caryl Phillips's A Distant Shore
1 Tropes of Zombifying Mobilities: Hiding, Confinement, Dehumanisation, and Darkness
2 Not Feeling It: Lost Selves, Lost Emotions
3 Europe and the Failures of Cosmopolitanism
4 Eliminating the Zombie
5 Conclusion: The Poetics of Zombification

Coda
Bibliography
Index

O autorze

Anna-Leena Toivanen, Ph.D. (2010), University of Jyväskylä, is Academy Research Fellow at the University of Eastern Finland and a former MSCA-IF Fellow. Her research on African and Afrodiasporic literatures has been published in diverse international peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes.