Gender, Migration, and the Claims of Postcolonial Nationhood in Francophone Africa examines three major migrant women writers from Francophone Africa: Ken Bugul, Calixthe Beyala, and Fatou Diome. Coly studies what home means in the context of migration and how gender shapes the meaning of home. This is the first study to bring together migrant women from Francophone Africa. This is also the first study to offer a feminist critique of postnationalist discourses of home, specifically the application of postnationalism to the postcolonial context.

Drawing from the diverse fields of postcolonial studies, literary studies, history, anthropology, sociology, political science, environmental studies, and development studies, among others, Gender and Sexuality in Senegalese Societies demonstrates the urgency and necessity of new research in gender and queer studies in and on Senegalese societies. By focusing on subjects that have thus far been largely neglected in national and scholarly debates, the chapters are subversive, complex, and inclusive, centering within Senegalese studies themes and elements of alternative, nonbinary, variant, and nonheteronormative gender identities, sexualities, and voices. Contributors demonstrate that nationalist and anticolonial discourses propelled by deep and lingering socioeconomic inequalities have led, in postcolonial Senegal, to vitriolic scapegoating of individuals and communities with variant sexual and gender identities. The chapters in this volume look inward to the voices and experiences of the Senegalese people to challenge nationalist representations of advocacy for the liberation of gender and sexual minorities in Senegal as a function of a Western neocolonialist agenda.

Postcolonial Hauntologies is an interdisciplinary and comparative analysis of critical, literary, visual, and performance texts by women from different parts of Africa. While contemporary critical thought and feminist theory have largely integrated the sexual female body into their disciplines, colonial representations of African women's sexuality "haunt" contemporary postcolonial African scholarship which--by maintaining a culture of avoidance about women's sexuality--generates a discursive conscription that ultimately holds the female body hostage. Ayo A. Coly employs the concept of "hauntology" and "ghostly matters" to formulate an explicative framework in which to examine postcolonial silences surrounding the African female body as well as a theoretical framework for discerning the elusive and cautious presences of female sexuality in the texts of African women. In illuminating the pervasive silence about the sexual female body in postcolonial African scholarship, Postcolonial Hauntologies challenges hostile responses to critical and artistic voices that suggest the African female body represents sacred ideological-discursive ground on which one treads carefully, if at all. Coly demonstrates how "ghosts" from the colonial past are countered by discursive engagements with explicit representations of women's sexuality and bodies that emphasize African women's power and autonomy.

Examines the process of nation making in Fiji, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu

Post/Colonialism and the Pursuit of Freedom in the Black Atlantic is an interdisciplinary collection of essays of wide historical and geographic scope which engages the legacy of diaspora, colonialism and slavery. The contributors explore the confrontation between Africa’s forced migrants and their unwelcoming new environments, in order to highlight the unique individual experiences of survival and assimilation that characterized Atlantic slavery. As they focus on the African or Afro-diasporan populations under study, the chapters gauge the degree to which formal independence, coming out of a variety of practices of opposition and resistance, lasting centuries in some cases, has translated into freedom, security, and a "good life." By foregrounding Hispanophone, Lusophone, and Francophone African and Afro-descendant concerns, over and against an often Anglo-centric focus in the field, the book brings a more representative approach to the area of diaspora or Black Atlantic studies, offering a more complete appreciation of Black Atlantic cultural production across history and across linguistic barriers.

Much of Francophone literature is a response to an elaborate discourse that served to bolster colonial French notions of national grandeur and to justify expansion of French territories overseas. A form of colonial exoticism saw the colonized subject as a physical, cultural, aesthetic and even sexual singularity. Francophone writers sought to rehabilitate the status of non-Western peoples who, through the use of anthropometric techniques, had been racially classified as inferior or primitive. Drawing on various Francophone texts, this collection of new essays offers a compelling study of the literary body--both corporeal and figurative. Topics include the embodiment of diasporic identity, the body politic in prison writing, women's bodies, and the body's expression of trauma inflicted by genocidal violence.

The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed an expansion of critical approaches to African literature. The Routledge Handbook of African Literature is a one-stop publication bringing together studies of African literary texts that embody an array of newer approaches applied to a wide range of works. This includes frameworks derived from food studies, utopian studies, network theory, eco-criticism, and examinations of the human/animal interface alongside more familiar discussions of postcolonial politics. Every chapter is an original research essay written by a broad spectrum of scholars with expertise in the subject, providing an application of the most recent insights into analysis of particular topics or application of particular critical frameworks to one or more African literary works. The handbook will be a valuable interdisciplinary resource for scholars and students of African literature, African culture, postcolonial literature and literary analysis. Chapter 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.