...Deepti Misri Abstract: This article explores how Shauna Singh Baldwin's novel What the Body Remembers builds on Partition feminist historiography in order to exhume and retell the story of family violence against women during India's Partition, intended to “save their honor” from rioting mobs...

...Ayesha Hardison Abstract This essay examines black women's transition from cultural consumers to artistic producers in Martha Southgate's under-studied novel Third Girl from the Left . Analyzing the text's exploration of black women's misrepresentation in popular film and mainstream narratives...

...Jennifer J. Smith Abstract Michelle Cliff's novels Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven have received significant critical attention for their attempts to establish a lineage of female resistance to oppression and to restore matrilineal histories that have been effaced by colonial and neocolonial...

...Jessica Labbé Abstract “‘Too high a price’: The ‘Terrible Honesty’ of Black Women's Work in Quicksand ” assumes a New Historical lens to understand the novel through its historical context and, inversely, to reveal a new knowledge of history and culture through Larsen's writing. The author argues...

...Courtney R. Baker Abstract This essay examines women’s literary mourning as expressed in the trope of lashing in Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel A Mercy . Structural ties, bonds, and lashes grant affective bonds in A Mercy a dangerous and sometimes lethal edge. This essay examines the fraught bonding...

...Chamara Moore Abstract How can Colson Whitehead’s combining of the generic and the strange in his Pulitzer Prize–winning speculative text The Underground Railroad be read as Afro-Pessimist? This essay seeks to illuminate the ways in which Whitehead’s novel provides narratives of self-making...

... analyze South Asian American chick-lit novels through sites—consumption, marriage, and realism—that are central to neoliberal subject-making, and that highlight the ways in which the novels work to produce a (trans)national, racialized, feminine subject embedded within neoliberalism, heteronormativity...

...Cynthia Wu Abstract My essay addresses non-normative genders and sexualities in Lois-Ann Yamanaka's Blu's Hanging , a controversial novel set in Hawai'i that—although commercially successful and critically acclaimed—has spurred protests over its racist portrayals of Filipino masculinity. I show how...

... the inextricable link between gender and performance. Undoubtedly, this landmark Kincaid story is in dialogue with Butler's theorization of the centrality of stylized acts in the creating and crafting of gendered selves. Less well known is Oonya Kempadoo's debut novel Buxton Spice (1999). Buxton Spice chronicles...

...Shanna Greene Benjamin Abstract Little more than a decade after publishing Invisible Man (1952), Ralph Ellison published “Out of the Hospital and under the Bar” (1963): an excised chapter of the novel that portrayed Mary Rambo—a black woman represented stereotypically in the published manuscript...

... in which the racist, patriarchal society in which they are raised and are living denies them and their mothers the ability to see themselves and each other as full subjects. Furthermore, locating Morrison's novel of female friendship alongside debates regarding whether feminist initiatives should favor...

...Marlo Starr Abstract In Ruth Ozeki's 2013 novel A Tale for the Time Being , sixteen-year-old Nao faces severe bullying and sexual violence at her new school in Japan. Seeking escape, she experiments with different identities, turning first to the Internet and then later to Zen Buddhist practices...

...Lauren J. Gantz Abstract This article argues that in her novel, At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999), Dionne Brand uses archives/archiving as a trope by which to trace slavery's aftereffects on the Caribbean and its diasporas. African diasporic authors and critics have long emphasized...

... deploys the idea of polygamy in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah (1987) in contrast to the exploration of polygamy in Nigerian-American dramatist Tess Onwueme’s early play The Reign of Wazobia (1988) , written a year after Chinua Achebe’s novel. As a third generation African writer, and one whose...

...Daphne Lamothe Abstract In The Fisher King , Paule Marshall depicts urban spatial and social relations that resonate with the psychic and social ruptures of the African Diaspora. The novel’s central characters comprise a blended family with Southern African American and Caribbean roots. They reckon...

...Nia McAllister Abstract Drawing inspiration from the 1982 novel, Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo by Ntozake Shange, the poem “Consort of the Spirits” celebrates the legacy of Black womanhood, ancestry, and resilience. The opening lines of Shange’s novel read: “Where there is a woman there is magic...

...Cherise Fung Abstract In a post-9/11 world, the figure of the female suicide bomber has emerged as a contentious figure in global discourse. Through the character of Saraswathi, Nayomi Munaweera’s novel Island of a Thousand Mirrors (2012) foregrounds how the construction of this subaltern figure...

... of oppression of the female body. This language of the body does not rely on essentialist parameters of “race” or of women's “nature.” On the contrary, by depicting rape as universal, non-culture–specific issue, Keller's novel sketches a mother–daughter relationship where the daughter finds a way to identify...

...-telling from all over the world. This transnational network of resistance extends in Cliffs novel from the Caribbean to the Pacific to Sephardic passageways; her character bears witness to events from the Spanish Inquisition to the Civil Rights era in the U.S., a temporal span that Cliff achieves through...

...Ariana Vigil Abstract Relying on feminist theory concerning difference, identity, gender, and solidarity, “Transnational Community in Demetria Martínez's Mother Tongue ” reads Martínez's 1994 novel through a transnational feminist lens. I point out that Mother Tongue complicates identification...