138 research outputs found
"Where the mask ends and the face begins is not certain": Mediating ethnicity and cheating geography in Jonny Steinberg's Little Liberia
Mixing historical commentary, reportage, biography and personal stories, South
African writer Jonny Steinberg takes up the tale of a fractured African nation and its
diaspora in Little Liberia: An African Odyssey in New York City (2011). The "little
Liberia" founded in New York's urban jungle may have represented, for many of its
inhabitants, a way to "cheat geography" by recreating a home away from home, but
Little Liberia shows the reader it has not allowed them to cheat history. The book
deals with the lives of two inhabitants of Park Hill Avenue on Staten Island, where
nearly everyone is Liberian. Their conflict threatens to implode the community, igniting
suspicions and accusations that had been bottled up since their exile. The article
focuses on the interface of mediated ethnicity and citizenship related to the struggle
for power in the diasporic Liberian community on Staten Island. Attention is also paid
to feelings of identity of Little Liberia's author.DHE
Questions of presence
This article considers some of the ways in which âthe black womanâ as both representation and embodied, sentient being is rendered visible and invisible and to link these to the multiple and competing ways in which she is âpresentâ. The issues are engaged through three distinct but overlapping conceptualisations of âpresenceâ. âPresenceâ as conceived (and highly contested) in performance studies; âpresenceâ as conceived and worked with in psychoanalysis; and âpresenceâ as decolonising political praxis among indigenous communities. I use these conceptualisations of presence to consider the various ways in which the black woman as figure and as embodied/sentient subject has been made present/absent in different discursive registers. I also explore what is foreclosed and how this is itself linked to legacies of colonial âworldingâ. I end with consideration of alternative modes of black womenâs presence and how this offers a resource for new modes of sociality.
Keywords
Black women; presence; colonial violence; de-gendering; psychosocial; triangular spac
CrĂ©olisation, CrĂ©olitĂ©, Martinique, and the Dangerous Intellectual Deception of âTous CrĂ©oles!â
Heterosexual HIV in a Creole World but with Western Norms: The Experience of the French Territories of Guadeloupe and Guiana
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