Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic Women’s Writing

'This finger-on-the-pulse book draws together an exciting line-up of contemporary African diasporic women writers – Nigerian-American, Caribbean, Nigerian-British, Somali-British, and Kenyan-American. Attending to affect and intimacy as much as diasporic longing, this sparkling study provides sharp literary and theoretical insights in equal measure.'

— Isabel Hofmeyr, Professor of African Literature, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa


'Bringing together affect studies with postcolonial theories of migration, displacement, and globalization, Jennifer Leetsch forcefully argues for the power of love in celebrated fictions by the most important African diaspora women writers today. Her meticulous and engaging readings of contemporary literature make a formidable case for how fiction can remake the world we live in to create space for better futures.'
— Yogita Goyal, Professor of English and African American Studies, UCLA, USA

This book sets out to investigate how contemporary African diasporic women writers respond to the imbalances, pressures and crises of twenty-first-century globalization by querying the boundaries between two separate conceptual domains: love and space. The study breaks new ground by systematically bringing together critical love studies with research into the cultures of migration, diaspora and refuge. Examining a notable tendency among current black feminist writers, poets and performers to insist on the affective dimension of world-making, the book ponders strategies of reconfiguring postcolonial discourses. Indeed, the analyses of literary works and intermedia performances by Chimamanda Adichie, Zadie Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, Shailja Patel and Warsan Shire reveal an urge of moving beyond a familiar insistence on processes of alienation or rupture and towards a new, reparative emphasis on connection and intimacy – to imagine possible inhabitable worlds.

Jennifer Leetsch isLecturer in English Literature at the University of Würzburg, Germany. Her research focuses on affect, gender and the black diaspora, and she has previously published on desire in African diasporic novels, refugee imaginaries and migratory material cultures.