World-Making Narratives

This open access book sets out to investigate how contemporary African women writers are challenging traditional ideas of Postcolonial and World Literature. This study offers an alternative framework of analysis, one in which the term “world” is not a mere adjective, but it refers to a re-evaluation of the notion of the world as a temporal category. The focus on the world’s temporality opens up to a reassessment of literature as a poietic force. The study analyses novels written by contemporary Anglophone and Francophone authors of African origin such as Taiye Selasi, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, NoViolet Bulawayo, and Alice Zeniter, demonstrating how their literary works can be read as world-making narratives of resistance. Engaging in the debate regarding the place of so-called Afropolitan literature within the global literary market, the current study argues that some contemporary postcolonial novels written by diasporic authors can be instances of literature’s poietic capacities. By offering an alternative analysis of such literary works, this book unveils their role as world-making narratives that can challenge post-/neo-colonial legacies of oppression in today’s globalised societies.

Alessandra Di Pietro received her doctorate in English and American Literature from the University of Bern, Switzerland. She is a research fellow at the “G. d’Annunzio” University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy. Her current research project looks at representations of African cosmologies in contemporary African and Caribbean Literatures. Her research interests include Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies, Feminist Theory and Queer Studies. She has attended various international conferences and her articles have appeared in a number of peer-reviewed journals and edited collections. She is a member of the research group L&GEND: Literature and Gender Identity, which is funded by the “G. d’Annunzio” University of Chieti-Pescara.