Pan–African American Literature

Signifyin(g) Immigrants in the Twenty-First Century

Stephanie Li

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780813592817
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

2019 Choice Outstanding Academic Title The twenty-first century is witnessing a dynamic broadening of how blackness signifies both in the U.S. and abroad. Literary writers of the new African diaspora are at the forefront of exploring these exciting approaches to what black subjectivity means. Pan-African American Literature is dedicated to charting the contours of literature by African born or identified authors centered around life in the United States. The texts examined here deliberately signify on the African American literary canon to encompass new experiences of immigration, assimilation and identification that challenge how blackness has been previously conceived. Though race often alienates and frustrates immigrants who are accustomed to living in all-black environments, Stephanie Li holds that it can also be a powerful form of community and political mobilization.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Signifyin(g) on the Slave Narrative: African Memoirs of War and Displacement
• Chapter 2: Uncanny Rememories in Teju Cole’s Open City
• Chapter 3: The Impossibility of Invisibility in the Novels of Dinaw Mengestu
• Chapter 4: Refiguring the Ancestor in the Fiction of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• Chapter 5: Becoming His Own Father: Obama’s Dreams from My Father
• Conclusion: Blackness Now
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• About the Author