In Between Worlds
Memory, Belonging And Quest For The Self In Contemporary Black British Women’s Autofiction
Summary
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Table of Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Development of Autofiction as an In-between Genre
- Historical Overview of Autofiction in the Continent
- Autofiction in the Anglophone Context
- Chapter 2 Theoretical Contexts
- Autofiction within Literary Theory
- Conceptual Framework
- Autoethnography and Postcolonial Theory
- Chapter 3 Multiethnicity as an In-between Cultural Position
- Conceptualisation of Multiethnicity
- Autotheory and Multiethnicity
- Autofiction/Autoethnography by Multi-ethnic Black British Women Authors
- Chapter 4 Charlotte Williams’s Sugar and Slate (2002)
- Entwinement of Individual and Collective Memories
- “Travelling Across Worlds of Thinking”
- Blurring of the Borders Around Britishness, Welshness and Blackness
- “Sugar and Slate”: Entangled Histories of the West Indies and Wales
- Chapter 5 Jackie Kay’s Red Dust Road (2010)
- Story of Adoption and Dual Heritage Interwoven with Fantasy
- “Red Dust Road”: Journey to the Interior
- Dislocation from Personal and National Home
- “Nature or Nurture”: Possibility of an Afro-Scottish Identity
- Chapter 6 Bernardine Evaristo’s Lara (1997/2009)
- History of the Self Knitted with “Untold” Stories of Ancestors
- “Family Is Like Water”: Crossing the Waters
- “Where Are You from Originally?”: Myth of “Purity”
- Transnational/Transcultural Reformulation of Cultural Identity
- Conclusion
- References
Ayda Önder
In Between Worlds Memory, Belonging and Quest for the Self in Contemporary Black British Women’s Autofiction
Berlin - Bruxelles - Chennai - Lausanne - New York - Oxford
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.
Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
Cover image © Shutterstock
ISBN 978-3-631-91585-1 (Print)
E-ISBN 978-3-631-93137-0 (E-PDF)
E-ISBN 978-3-631-93138-7 (E-PUB)
DOI 10.3726/b22595
© 2025 Peter Lang Group AG, Lausanne
Published by Peter Lang GmbH, Berlin, Germany
info@peterlang.com - www.peterlang.com
All rights reserved.
All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.
Any utilization outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution.
This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.
This publication has been peer reviewed.
About the author
Ayda Önder holds a PhD in English Literature from Yeditepe University, Turkey. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Istanbul Arel University. Her research interests lie in autofiction, gothic fiction, literary theories, postcolonial literature, and comparative literature.
About the book
This book traces the development of autofiction along with the other directions it has led to, such as autoethnography and autotheory, and explores their textual potentialities to reproduce underrepresented realities of multi-ethnicity. It presents how the hybridity and in-betweenness of these mixed literary novelties mirror the multi-ethnic feeling of being caught between different cultural worlds, and how their ambivalence within literary categorisation provides spaces of inclusion for individuals whose multiple ethnicities transcend the rigid borders of pre-existing racial, national, ethnic and cultural classifications. Despite claiming to focus on authors labelled under “Black British Women”, the book shows the ineffectiveness of homogenising categories, yielding implications for the reconsideration of the hegemonic divisions between ‘Europeanness’ and ‘Africanness’.
This eBook can be cited
This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.
Preface
This book is based on the author’s doctoral dissertation of the same title. It examines the development of autofiction along with the other directions it has led to such as autoethnography and autotheory, and explores their textual potentialities to reproduce the underrepresented realities of multi-ethnicity. In contradistinction to the white heterosexual male subject of traditional autobiography, the project is concerned with the ways in which these mixed literary novelties permit racialised and gendered individuals to resist the dominant systems of representation and to depict their multi-layered subjectivities and existence outside normative definitions. Although the book claims to focus specifically on works by the authors who are grouped under the label “Black British women”, it seeks to demonstrate ineffectiveness of homogenising categories of identification by offering a comparative analysis of Welsh-Guyanese Charlotte Williams’s Sugar and Slate (2002), Scottish-Nigerian Jackie Kay’s Red Dust Road (2010), and English-Nigerian Bernardine Evaristo’s Lara (1997/2009). These mixed-descent authors’ portrayals of the diversity of their ethnic backgrounds and uniqueness of their life journeys evidence that there is not a single way of being “British”, “black” or “woman”. The contention of the book is that hybridity and in-betweenness of autofiction mirror the multi-ethnic feeling of being caught between different cultural worlds, and its ambivalence within literary categorisation provides spaces of inclusion for individuals whose multiple ethnicities transcend the strict borders of pre-existing racial, national, ethnic and cultural classifications. It is further argued that autoethnography enables these authors to imagine their personal worlds as intricately connected to multiple collective worlds, and to assert interconnectivity of cultures and societies, which disrupts the hegemonic divisions between Europeanness and Africanness. The book is structured around the contemporary perspectives on the concepts of memory, belonging and subjectivity, which are argued to be relevant to the main assumptions of both autofiction and multiethnicity.
Details
- Pages
- 212
- Publication Year
- 2025
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9783631931370
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9783631931387
- ISBN (Softcover)
- 9783631915851
- DOI
- 10.3726/b22595
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2025 (March)
- Keywords
- Autofiction autoethnography autotheory multiethnicity memory belonging hybridity In Between Worlds Memory, Belonging and Quest for the Self in Contemporary Black British Women’s Autofiction Ayda Önder
- Published
- Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, New York, Oxford, 2025. 212 pp.,
- Product Safety
- Peter Lang Group AG
