Carole Boyce Davies

As Africans and descendants of slaves have sought to expand an understanding of their history, focus on the African diaspora - the global dispersal of a people and their culture - has increased. African studies have assumed a prominent place in historical scholarship, and a growing number of non-African scholars has helped revise a discipline established over several decades. The six contributions in this volume were compiled as a result of the thirtieth Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures held at the University of Texas at Arlington. The contributors, nationally recognized in the field, represent a collaborative analysis of the African diaspora from African and non-African perspectives.

"Black Women, Writing, and Identity is a salient examination of black women's writing and the politics of subjectivity and identity. Emerging out a critical need to situate black women's writing in a cross-cultural perspective, Carole Boyce Davies investigates critically the complexities, the contradictions, and the constraints which both determine and displace the black women writer's identity. Treating such issues as locationality and naming, Carol Boyce Davies produces a remarkably imaginative and acutely exciting discussion of the what she uniquely terms the "migratory subject.""--Provided by publisher.

v. 1. International dimensions of Black women's writing -- . v. 2. Black women's diasporas

"Both a memoir and a scholarly study, this project explores the multivalent meanings of Caribbean space and community in a cross-cultural and transdisciplinary perspective. Drawing on experiential knowledge and theory, Boyce Davies has crafted this set of reflective essays to illuminate the dynamic and ever-changing complexity of Caribbean culture and to trace its migratory patterns in and between the Americas. In weaving the private spaces of the author's individual story with public spaces of Caribbean culture, Boyce Davies crosses many cultural and disciplinary boundaries. Such movements are necessary to understand the interrelated dynamics of race, gender, and sexuality embedded in Caribbean spaces, and also many Caribbean people's traumatic and transformative stories of displacement, migration, and exile. From there, she dwells on the way her knowledge has informed her political vision as it links to broader, black diaspora matters including the 1960s civil rights movement, the environmental catastrophes of Haiti, the failure of the New Orleans levies, technologies such as the iPhone and GPS, and how all these things are understood and informed by a Caribbean logic. Family narratives, local knowledge, poems, literary analyses, descriptions of artwork, and accounts of spiritual practices are cohesively used to sustain a comprehensive theoretical analysis fostered by the author's extensive fieldwork and research. Ultimately, Boyce Davies reestablishes the link between theory and practice and intellectual work and activism which, the author argues, marked the beginning of Black Studies itself"--

Ngambika is a Tshiluba (Central Africa) phrase whose closest english rendition is "Help Me To Balance This Load." An African woman who has to carry a heavy load often asks another woman to help her lift it onto her head while she finds the correct posture and balance to shoulder the weight herself. In most cases, the load is within her capability, so she balances it herself without assistance. This balancing process is the symbolic representation of the balance between woman's emancipation and commitment to total African liberation that is at the core of this book. The criticism in Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature is concerned with expanding and augmenting the interpretation of the whole body of African literary creativity. It is a concerted attempt to redress the relative inattention to women in African literary scholarship. Towards this end, the editorial and ideological orientation here is not just around the works of women writers (and critics), but around African writers ranging from Buchi Emecheta and Wole Soyinka to Mariama Bâ and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o.