Afropean Female Selves: Migration and Language in the Life Writing of Fatou Diome and Igiaba Scego [Paperback]

Afropean Female Selves offers a comparative study across two languages of a notion that has so far been explored mainly in English. It explores the contours of this new discursive category and positions it in regard to other notions of Afrodiasporic identity, such as Afropolitan and Afro-European.

Introduction

Chapter One: Life Writing and Writing Lives

Chapter Two: Afropean Homes: Representations of Belonging

Chapter Three: Gender and Migration: Opportunities for Afropean Experience

Chapter Four: Language and Afropean Identity

Chapter Five: Writing and Engagement

Conclusion: Afropean Languages and Locales

Afropean Female Selves: Migration and Language in the Life Writing of Fatou Diome and Igiaba Scego examines the corpus of writing of two contemporary female authors. Both writers are of African descent, live in Europe and write about lives across Europe and Africa in different languages (French and Italian). Their work involves episodes from their lived experience and complicates Western understandings of life writing and autobiography. As Hogarth shows in this study, the works of Diome and Scego encapsulate the new and complex identities of contemporary Afropeans. As an identity coined and used frequently by prominent authors and critics across Europe, Africa and North America, the notion of Afropean is at the cutting edge of cultural analyses today. Yet each writer occupies unique and different positions within this debated category. While Scego is a post-migratory subject in postcolonial Europe, Diome is an African writer who has migrated to Europe in her adult life. This book examines the different trajectories anl#g