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.

Culinary Inclinations as a Reflection of Identity in Joanne Harris’s ‘Chocolat’

“Tell me what you eat, I’ll tell you what you are.” : Brillat-Savarin. Literature has always been the mode of reflecting human psyche representing the language of people’s culture and traditions. The culture of food is age old and it shapes the individuals as well as a society’s culture. Complex human issues have been analysed using food images on a metaphoric level to represent cultural identities. Importance of food in literature and the role it played in gender studies asserting women’s suppressed individuality and identity is an upcoming area of study. Apart from observing that women are reduced as a kitchen maker, in today’s society kitchen and cooking are a means of expressing one’s identity before the world and is well expressed in various literary forms. Food and its related concerns with feminine identity and domesticity patriarchal oppression, and repressed sexual desire. have been given a central place in many works of women’s literature. One such English writer who used culinary art in her work is Joanne Harris who’s novel Chocolat deals with the magical powers of chocolate and how it works on the people of a particular town attacking the cultural and traditional beliefs of that place rewriting a cultural identity.

POETRY OF RUSSIAN AND CHINESE FEMALE POETS A.P. BUNINA AND LI QINGZHAO: CONVERGENCES AND DIFFERENCES

This article is devoted to the analysis of typological similarities and differences in the works of Russian and Chinese poetesses using the example of Anna Bunina and Li Qingzhao. These poetesses weren’t contemporaries, their lives fell on different historical eras, but the work of both became the starting point for women's literature in their countries, and this is the first feature that unites them. The article gives a brief description of the creativity of both poetesses, identifies a range of similar topics and common features of their artistic approaches. It is noted that both poetesses for the first time made an attempt to comprehend the essence of women's poetry and the essence of poetry in general, and their conclusions turn out to be surprisingly similar, despite the difference in cultures and historical eras to which they belonged.

Why Is the History of Ukrainian Literature Silent About the Women Writers of the Second and Third Decades of the 20th Century?

The article deals with the problem of avoiding women’s literature of the 1920s and 1930s in the narrative of the history of Ukrainian literature. This period is called the Executed Renaissance and is the key to the nation-making narrative. It is seen as the time of the modern nation formation and the time of the greatest sacrifice in the name of the nation. Women’s literature of that time is selectively discussed in this context, but the bulk of female literature of that period remains out of the attention of researchers, despite the fact that both the previous stage of development of women’s literature and subsequent ones are present in the narrative of the history of Ukrainian literature. The article hypothesizes that the period of the 1920s and 1930s “fell out” because the women’s literature of that time did not meet the needs of the nation-making narrative that dominates the Ukrainian humanities. The aim of the study is to show this discrepancy by analyzing the representation of gender practices in women’s texts of that period. The theoretical basis of the work was the ideas by Anne McClintock, Yuval-Davis, Joane Nagel, Robert Connell, Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak. As a result of the study, it has been revealed that women’s literature of the time has different topics and problems, which is due to different experiences. Describing the Bolshevik reforms, women attach equal importance to changes in management and forms of ownership, as well as to the new norms of family and maternal law. The women writers remind of the importance of women’s work in enterprises and in agriculture, especially in the absence of men involved in the war. The literature reflects the rapid expansion of the range of characters’ professions, but at the same time shows the complexity of self-realization, especially when it is necessary to combine profession and motherhood. At this time, women speak more openly about cathexis, challenging patriarchal norms. The image of a woman, in particular of a mother, created by the woman writers did not correspond to the symbolic image of the nation’s reproducer, so the return of women’s literature of the 1920s and 1930s did not meet the needs of the nation-making narrative in the post-Soviet conditions.

Forgotten Time and Valued Space: Montage Narrative in Republican Chinese Women’s Literature

In the West, montage was originally practiced in avant-garde movements. Although montage was widely discussed in the Western context since its origin, this concept is also connected to the literature and culture of modern China in a certain way. Among the Republican Chinese writers, many women writers attempted to employ montage narrative in their creative writing. These writers transformed the montage narrative into a gendered one and used it to also secretly realise their attack on male neotraditional ideology. As a narrative strategy, montage provides a narrative possibility for women writers to deconstruct the prevalent discourse on gender roles, and to construct their identity, meanwhile conveying their innovative and unique understanding regarding feminism and modernity in modern China.

Gender and Chinese Translations of Chinese American Women’s Literature: Marital Sexual Violence in Amy Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife

Comparing three Chinese translations of Amy Tan’s novel The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), this article explores gender issues in Chinese translations of Chinese American women’s literature from a feminist perspective. Using the feminist concept of female alienation, it explores how feminist consciousness and sexual alienation caused by marital sexual violence in the source text are expressed in the Chinese translations, and how far the translations achieve (feminist) translation equivalence. Special attention is paid to the translators’ gender consciousness and ideologies, as reflected in their translations, in order to explore the role played by gender in the translation of women’s writing.

Female characters in Kenyan women’s short story: From submission to self-reliance

The article analyses the depiction of new types of female characters in the stories by Kenyan female writers published from 2003 to 2012 in literary almanacs Kwani? and Storymoja. The author traces the evolution of female characters from the “victim” type, which appeared in Kenyan women’s literature already in the 1960s, to its modern alternatives – women advocating their rights in all spheres of private and public life.

Power of Body / Power of Mind: Arts and Crafts, New Thought, and Popular Women’s Literature at the Fin de Siècle

The article describes the impact of two popular fin de siècle philosophical movements—Arts and Crafts and New Thought—on both well-known authors like Frank Norris and Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the lesser-known writers it reads more closely: Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Madeline Yale Wynne. Although their values were antithetical, Arts and Crafts and New Thought shared striking similarities in the ways they yoked consumption habits to personal well-being and used fiction to understand and endorse popular secular philosophies. These women-led movements shaped enduring national ideologies and the literature of their period, which tends to either synthesize the beliefs of both movements or represent one as patently superior to the other through satire or protest. The recovery of the history of these movements and their contribution to American literature not only retraces a lost genealogy of popular ideas that have shaped our culture, but also demonstrates the centrality of female thinkers and writers to the development of our present-day notions about how to transcend the grinding forces of consumer capitalism in everyday life.

Carnivalizing Imoinda’s Silence

In this essay, I analyze Joan Anim-Addo’s libretto Imoinda, or She Who Will Lose Her Name (2008) and illustrate how its narrative poetry generates a speculative, gendered history around the slave past. Informed by Srinivas Aravamudan’s observation of parodic subversion in the afterlives of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), I return to Anim-Addo’s oeuvre in order to read Imoinda as a work that counter-writes the colonial gaze of “Western” knowledge. By centering on Caribbean carnival as the performance context for the libretto, I examine how histories of rebellion and survival carried out by enslaved Africans and their descendants unfold through the libretto’s narrative poetry. I argue that Imoinda, under the guise of artistic forms associated with “the West,” breaks from Eurocentric perspectives that misrepresented subaltern struggles while ushering forth the question of “who speaks?” in critical discourses. I conclude by aligning Anim-Addo’s Imoinda in relation to Sylvia Wynter’s conceptualization of “demonic grounds” to highlight a transformative epistemic space of Caribbean women’s literature.