Migrant women, place and identity in contemporary women's writing

While recent scholarship on migration has reflected growing attention to gender, and to the intersectionality of race, gender and sexuality, there has been little focus on women's emotional and bodily responses to migration in the context of larger structures of sexism, racism, and the legacies of colonialism. In this paper I examine some literary portrayals of how migrant women's relationships with specific places of origin and settlement, both steeped in structural relationships of unequal power and experienced on an immediate, psychological and bodily plane, are fundamental to migrant women's changing sense of belonging and identity. Jamaica Kincaid in her novel Lucy, Tsitsi Dangarembga in her novel Nervous Conditions, and Dionne Brand in the opening poems of her volume No Language is Neutral evoke some of the complex ways in which migration can affect women's lives and identities, thus both complementing and critiquing some contemporary theorisations of migration and migrant identities

Self-determination, race, and empire: feminist nationalists in Britain, Ireland and the United States, 1830s to World War One

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed women's claims to political, cultural and social rights and agency, as well as the growth of imperial and anti-imperial nationalisms within the metropole and colonial locations. This article draws on three case studies, the black nationalist journalism of the 1830s in the United States, the black abolitionist journalism of the 1850s, the ‘English’ Edwardian feminism and suffrage periodical press, and Irish suffrage journalism of the First World War, to explore the ways in which feminism and nationalism interacted, and drew on the conceptual resources each offered. A particular focus of this article is on the extent to which suffrage and feminist social movements were not just shaped by nationalism, but also constitutive of it. The realm of print culture can be seen as a relatively novel ‘public sphere’ available to women who in general lacked access to other public spheres through their gender and racial marginality