Reading Black Female Voices in Spain: Towards a translation history of African American women’s literature

This paper presents a descriptive approach to the reception of African American women’s literature in Spain through the study of its translation history. In this context, the first part of the paper describes the endeavor of developing AfroBib, a bibliographical tool that compiles exhaustive data about translations of African American women authors published in Spain. The second part of the paper discusses the translation history of African American women’s literature in the target country based on the statistical analysis of the data provided by our main research tool. The results display clear evidence of the increase in the circulation of African American women’s works and illustrate a complex network of social and literary factors that have influenced choices and strategies governing the translation of African American women writers in the country. This study offers unprecedented data, thereby holding out the prospect of encouraging parallel research lines.

Representation of Marginalization in the Life Writing of African American Women Writers

The process of imperialism and colonialism was established on the covert idea of economic and political exploitation of the underdeveloped eastern cultures by the dominant west. With the process of decolonization, the marginalized and the poor have been given a centre space alongwith the reversal of the order where those who were the object for centuries, suddenly refuse to be subjected to misrepresentation and domination, and begin to constitute their own discourses. Literature serves as a medium of honest self expression and platform to express the true self for women. American society has triply disempowered and disenfranchised African American women on the basis of race, gender and class. Many African American women writers attempt to break down traditional structures and dislocate narrative strategies in order to re-examine subject identity and to demonstrate the complexity of female experience. By writing about their lives the marginalized are valorized and their oppression turns into empowerment. Life writing helps females to explore subjectivity and to assume authorship of their own life. The account of the life of African American women writers chronicles their frequent encounters with racism, sexism and classism as they describe the people, events and personal qualities that helped them to survive the devastating effects of their environment.

Science Fictionality and Post-65 Asian American Literature

Since 1965, Asian American authors have been key mediators of science fictionality, defined as a postwar fantasy that associates endless, industrial-led economic expansion with racialized groups of upwardly mobile professionals. This status is a consequence of the occupational concentration of Asian immigrants into professional-managerial careers, especially in scientific and technical fields: a phenomenon that can be traced back to the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. Reading Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior (1976) along with the debut works of recent Chinese American women writers, including Ling Ma’s Severance (2018), this article describes a dialectic of science fictionality and post-65 Asian American literature in which the latter develops autopoetic tendencies that register occupational concentration in genre, theme, characterization, and trope. This reorientation of post-65 Asian American literary history to the material conditions of science fictionality, rather than ethnic self-expression, has implications not only for understanding that history but also for generalized periodizations of contemporary US literature like the “genre turn,” which risk eliding the specificity of minority literary histories.

Sex, Violence, and Religion in the Irish-American Domestic Novel

This chapter compares post-war Irish-American domestic novels by male and female authors, examining the influence of politics, assimilation, and ethnic identity on their plots and characters. Focusing on representative novels per decade from the 1940s to the present, the analysis finds that while both male and female writers agree that married life rarely equals domestic bliss, the authors’ gender identity determines their representation of the roles played by marriage, sexuality, and religion. The first part of the chapter examines the preponderance of adultery and gendered abuse; the second discusses attitudes towards women, sex, and sexual preference; and the third traces the movement from immigrant piety to an intellectual, independent view of the Church that acknowledges its ongoing gender hierarchy. The discussion not only reveals the progression of Irish Americans’ fictional lives since the 1940s but also examines the role of Irish-American women writers in expanding that view.

Transamerican Sentimentalism and Nineteenth-Century US Literary History

Transamerican Sentimentalism and Nineteenth-Century US Literary History argues that African American, Native American, Latinx, and Anglo-American women writers use genre to negotiate hemispheric encounters amidst the gendered, racialized, and cultural violence of the nineteenth-century Americas. Although US literary sentimentalism is often framed in national and transatlantic terms, this book argues that the mode was deeply transamerican. Given the popularity of the nineteenth-century sentimental novel, the appearance of its central motifs—tearful embraces, fainting heroines, angelic children—in transamerican US texts is unsurprising. What is remarkable is how texts not generally considered sentimental deploy seemingly insignificant affective episodes to navigate gendered and racialized experiences of conflict throughout the Caribbean and the US–Mexico borderlands. Throughout Transamerican Sentimentalism, marginal characters, momentary gestures, offhand remarks, and narrative commentaries serve to disrupt plots, potentially connecting characters across cultural, racial, national, and linguistic borders. Transamerican sentimentalism cannot unseat the violence of the nineteenth-century Americas, but it does dislocate familiar figures such as the coquette and the mulatta to produce other potential outcomes—including new paradigms for understanding the coquette, a locally successful informal diplomacy, and motivations for violent slave revolt. Transamerican sentimentalism is a fleeting, mercurial, and marginal mode. Frequently overwhelmed by the violence pervading the hemisphere, it could be categorized as a failed venture. Yet it is also persistent; as it recurs throughout the nineteenth century, it opens into alternative African American, Native American, and Latinx avenues for navigating and comprehending US–Americas relations.

Jewish American Women Writers in the 18th and 19th Centuries

While the only existing substantial writings by Jewish women in 18th-century North America are the letters of Abigail Levy Franks and Rebecca Gratz, several 19th-century women published novels, short stories, essays, and poetry. Moreover, a periodical edited by Rosa Sonneschein, The American Jewess, appeared between 1895 and 1899. Despite these writers’ important literary contributions both to Jewish and general readerships, their work was often overlooked in studies of American literature. While women’s writings in general have frequently been neglected and excluded from literary canons, it is likely that the situation for Jewish female authors was also a result of their triple “otherness,” as artists, women, and Jews. In addition to a general bias against female literary endeavors in the 19th-century, these writers’ own culture often rebuffed their ambitions. Hence, Jewish women writers sometimes lived with a sense of agonizing ambivalence within a Jewish community that tended to reject their aspirations. However, while a life dedicated to literature required sacrifices, these women found that writing allowed them to repossess and investigate their Jewish legacy. This bibliography focuses on primary documents and scholarly writings that demonstrate the literary accomplishments of the 18th-century Franks and a range of 19th-century Jewish American women novelists, short story writers, poets, and essayists who wrote in English.