Reading the Intersectionality of Race, Gender, and Diaspora in Contemporary Black Women’s Writing

Raffaoui, Nahla (2024) Reading the Intersectionality of Race, Gender, and Diaspora in Contemporary Black Women’s Writing. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

This thesis explores the representations of race, gender, and diaspora in contemporary Black diasporic women’s writing published between 2010 and 2018. This era that is marked by heated political climate is significant for the recognition of Black women’s literary productions. The study is interested in the ways the selected Black women writers negotiate gender and race in their writing and how they use their texts to mobilise diasporic constructs in a transnational context. I build on an intersectional Black feminist approach which is applicable to the race and gender dialogues that I argue the selected texts offer. Along with intersectionality, I develop on diaspora studies to read the ways these writers reflect on Black women’s negotiations of cultural heritage and diasporic identities as impacted by the intersections of race and gender. My outlook is transnational as the texts offer us cross-border experiences where writers and their texts move between Black Atlantic spaces of Africa, Britain, America, and the Caribbean. I take formalist approaches to consider the different genres of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction to argue that these writers employ these genres for their significance in diasporic Black women’s literary tradition as mediums to convey Black women’s marginalised narratives with race and gender. I argue that through alternately different and similar approaches, including reimagining Black women’s lives within historical and contemporary settings, and using their own personal experiences, with these intersections, the writers and their texts expose the complexity of gender and race experiences in the diaspora. The texts studied offer us an insight into different Black feminist dialogues that occupy Black women’s diasporic writing throughout the many generations in a contemporary context.