This presentation introduces my doctoral thesis—now in the process of turning into a book—which investigates gender and resistance issues and historicises the literary legacies and genealogies of Anglophone African women’s writing by analysing twelve fictions of four notable writers: Buchi Emecheta and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie from Nigeria and Tsitsi Dangarembga and Yvonne Vera from Zimbabwe. The theoretical approach I use takes inspiration from Sara Ahmed’s thesis on willfulness, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, and bell hooks’s concept of solidarity. The presentation continues with a focus on my research project at the University of Vienna, which addresses the New African American diaspora discussed in 21st-century fiction by African women writers, such as Bisi Adjapon, NoViolet Bulawayo, and Yejide Kilanko. I will draw on Sara Ahmed’s thesis about the circulation of emotions to examine affect, integration and cultural assimilation issues discussed in fiction.
Isabella Villanova is an Ernst Mach postdoctoral fellow at the Institut für Afrikawissenschaften of the University of Vienna. In 2021, she earned a PhD in Anglophone African women’s writing from the University of Padua (Italy); then, she was a visiting scholar at the University of Leeds (UK) and worked as an Adjunct Professor of English literature at the University for Foreigners of Perugia (Italy). Her first monograph, titled The Politics of Gender in Nigerian and Zimbabwean Women’s Fiction: Agencies and Strategies of Resistance, will be published by Peter Lang in 2025.
Chair: Dobrota Pucherova
Tuesday, 23rd April 2024, 5:15 pm
Department of African Studies - Seminar room 1 and online
Zoom Link: https://univienna.zoom.us/j/63904002477?pwd=UVRFRnp1Y1AvQ0JIL0VBME5URnFsQT09
University Campus, court 5.1., Spitalgasse 2, 1090 Vienna
afrika@univie.ac.at, afrika.univie.ac.at
