Overview
- Offers a set of new critical approaches to understanding the figures of madness as the concept moves across literary and cultural traditions in the African Diasporic world
- Applies literary and cultural analyses to audiences engaged with understandings of psychological wellness, social justice, race, and gender
- Connects existing sociological work to literary understandings of madness via differing sites of geographic migration
- Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
- Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
Part of the book series: Gender and Cultural Studies in Africa and the Diaspora (GCSAD)
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Table of contents (11 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Revisiting the Archive, Re-inscribing Its Texts: Slavery and Madness as Historical Contestation
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Front Matter
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The Contradictions of Witnessing in Conflict Zones: Trauma and Testimony
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Front Matter
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Form, Mythic Space: Syncretic Rituals as Healing Balm
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This collection chronicles the strategic uses of madness in works by black women fiction writers from Africa, the Caribbean, Canada, Europe, and the United States. Moving from an over-reliance on the “madwoman” as a romanticized figure constructed in opposition to the status quo, contributors to this volume examine how black women authors use madness, trauma, mental illness, and psychopathology as a refraction of cultural contradictions, psychosocial fissures, and political tensions of the larger social systems in which their diverse literary works are set through a cultural studies approach.
The volume is constructed in three sections: Revisiting the Archive, Reinscribing Its Texts: Slavery and Madness as Historical Contestation, The Contradictions of Witnessing in Conflict Zones: Trauma and Testimony, and Novel Form, Mythic Space: Syncretic Rituals as Healing Balm. The novels under review re-envision the initial trauma of slavery and imperialism, bothacknowledging the impact of these events on diasporic populations and expanding the discourse beyond that framework. Through madness and healing as sites of psychic return, these novels become contemporary parables of cultural resistance.
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Caroline A. Brown is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Montreal, Canada. She is author of The Black Female Body in American Literature and Art: Performing Identity (2012). Her articles have appeared in African American Review, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, National Women’s Studies Association Journal, and several other journals and edited collections.
Johanna X. K. Garvey is Associate Professor of English at Fairfield University, USA, where she was founding Co-Director of the Women’s Studies Program and the Program in Black Studies: Africa and the Diaspora. She has published on Ann Petry, Michelle Cliff, Merle Collins, Paule Marshall, Dionne Brand, Shani Mootoo, Patricia Powell, Maryse Condé, and others, in Callaloo, The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literature, Textual Practice, Anthurium, and elsewhere. She is completing a book manuscript on Caribbean women writing diaspora.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Madness in Black Women’s Diasporic Fictions
Book Subtitle: Aesthetics of Resistance
Editors: Caroline A. Brown, Johanna X. K. Garvey
Series Title: Gender and Cultural Studies in Africa and the Diaspora
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58127-9
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2017
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-58126-2Published: 16 November 2017
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-86328-3Published: 23 August 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-58127-9Published: 04 November 2017
Series ISSN: 2946-3793
Series E-ISSN: 2946-3807
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XI, 326
Topics: African American Culture, Postcolonial/World Literature, Gender Studies, American Culture, Contemporary Literature