Afropean Female Selves: Migration and Language in the Life Writing of Fatou Diome and Igiaba Scego examines the corpus of writing of two contemporary female authors. Both writers are of African descent, live in Europe and write about lives across Europe and Africa in different languages (French and Italian). Their work involves episodes from their lived experience and complicates Western understandings of life writing and autobiography. As Hogarth shows in this study, the works of Diome and Scego encapsulate the new and complex identities of contemporary "Afropeans." As an identity coined and used frequently by prominent authors and critics across Europe, Africa and North America, the notion of "Afropean" is at the cutting edge of cultural analyses today. Yet each writer occupies unique and different positions within this debated category. While Scego is a "post-migratory subject" in postcolonial Europe, Diome is an African writer who has migrated to Europe in her adult life. This book examines the different trajectories and packaging of these two specific postcolonial writers in the Francophone and Italophone contexts, pointing out how and where each author practices life writing strategies and scrutinizing the trend that emphasizes the life writing, autofictional, or autoethnographic strategies of African diasporic writers. Afropean Female Selves offers a comparative study across two languages of a notion that has so far been explored mainly in English. It explores the contours of this new discursive category and positions it in regard to other notions of Afrodiasporic identity, such as Afropolitan and Afro-European.
Author(s): Christopher Hogarth
Series: Routledge Auto/Biography Studies
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 196
City: New York
Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Afropean By Any Other Name? Categorizing African and European Cultural Connections
Strategically Conflated Categories? Migrant Writing and Afro-Italian Literature as New Discursive Categories in Italian ...
French and Francophone Afropeans? Generational Diversity Within a Category in France
Notes
References
1 Life Writing and Writing Lives
“Salie, C’est Moi?”: Fatou Diome’s Fiction and Life Writing
Igiaba Scego: Afropean Writing and Writing Africans in Italy
Notes
References
2 Afropean Homes: Representations of Belonging
Fatou Diome’s Afropean Women: From Economic to Refuge-Seeking Migrants
Scego’s Afropeans: Unpacking Generational Belonging
Notes
References
3 Gender and Migration: Opportunities for Afropean Experience
Who Are the Female Afropeans? Women and Mobility in Celles Qui Attendent
Women Telling the Story of (Afropean?) Migration
Diome’s Alternative Afropean Families
Male Mobility Versus Female Stasis: The Gendered Availability of Afropean Experience
Nomadic Helpers: Female Enablement of Migration in Igiaba Scego
Notes
References
4 Language and Afropean Identity
Igiaba Scego: “Letteratura Della Migrazione,” “Italophone” Literature and Marketing of the Multilingual Migrant Text
Fatou Diome’s Translingual Writing: A Peculiar Form of Linguistic Inclusivity
French and the Language Question in Postcolonial Senegal
French and Vernacular Languages in Fatou Diome’s Translingual Imagination
Notes
References
5 Writing and Engagement
Afropean Engagement: A Burden of Commitment?
Igiaba Scego: Editing as Commitment
Scego’s Memoir: Life Writing, Commitment and Pedagogy
Engagement and Decolonizing
Fatou Diome: Engagement and Renewed Notoriety
Commitment and Popularity: Recent Packaging of Diome and Scego
Conclusions
Notes
References
Conclusion: Afropean Languages and Locales
The European Language(s) of Afropeans
Brazen, But With Some Borders
References
Index
