Dialogues across Diasporas: Women Writers, Scholars, and Activists of Africana and Latina Descent in Conversation

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Dialogues Across Diasporas focuses on the shared historical legacies of members of the Africana and Latina diasporas, and the cultural impact of the African diaspora in the Americas. This book seeks to emphasize connections rather than divisions among different migratory ethnic communities via a reconfiguration of borders and ethnic identities. This collection of essays has three major goals: first, to foreground shared themes and strategies in the literary productions of women of Africana and Latina/o descent; second, to highlight the importance of the arts for community activism within shared diasporic spaces; and third, to illustrate the potential of artistic and activist collaborations among women from both groups across disciplinary, political, national, and ethnic divides. Dialogues across Diasporas is divided into three sections. The first section provides a theoretical overview of diasporic migrations, politics, and identities. It argues that diverse diasporas can unite around shared political and cultural experiences such as converting contested spaces into communities and resisting rhetorics of exclusion. The second section demonstrates the diverse ways in which migratory women and daughters of the diaspora frame their histories, lived experiences, and different forms of knowledge via poetry, short stories, academic essays, and other art forms. The third section focuses on womens activism, suggesting opportunities for collaboration among and between diverse diasporic communities.

Reviews

A stunning and unique contribution in the field of Africana Studies. Includes eloquent and highly readable work by female creative writers, community activists, and scholars of the African diaspora from Africa, Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean region, and the United States. Notably, this collection not only emerged from a two-day symposium in El Paso del Norte in 2010, but from where a majority of the nineteen contributors presently live and work, or have had past experiential contact with the U.S. Mexico borderlands. This book expands the horizons of interdisciplinary and intersectional scholarship in the already established areas of American-, Woman-, and Cultural Studies. -- Marta E. Sanchez, Arizona State University
This edited collection of must-read writings proposes a new, holistic, and persuasive manner of framing diasporas. Dialogues across Diasporas creates the necessary intellectual space for examining issues that speak to the core of our own identities, in different geographic locations and across the disciplines. It provides the missing discursive parameters that will guide discussions in decades to come. -- William Luis, Vanderbilt University

Author Bio

Marion Rohrleitner is an assistant professor of English and affiliate faculty in the Womens Studies and African American Studies Programs at the University of Texas at El Paso, where she teaches 20th and 21st century American, Chicana/o and Latina/o, Caribbean, and African diasporic literatures. Her articles, book chapters, and book reviews have appeared in American Quarterly, Antpodas: A Journal of Hispanic and Galician Studies, Callaloo, El Mundo Zurdo, Interdisciplinary Humanities, and Latino Studies. Her first book, Diasporic Bodies: Contemporary Historical Fictions and the Intimate Public Sphere, is a finalist for the ICI manuscript competition at Vanderbilt University. Sarah E. Ryan is an empirical research librarian at the Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale University. She is an M.L.S. candidate at Texas Womans University, and holds an M.A. in Interpersonal Communication, Graduate Certificate in Womens Studies, and Ph.D. in Rhetorical Criticism from Ohio University. Sarah has published extensively on the topics of good governance and community rebuilding in Rwanda, including a 2012 article in the Loyola University Chicago Law Journal entitled Fulfilling the U.S. obligation to prevent exterminationism: A comprehensive approach to regulating hate speech and dismantling systems of genocide. She has also published in: Contemporary Argumentation & Debate, Journal of Development Communication, Journal of Public Affairs Education, Peace Review, Review of Communication, Women & Language, and in a variety of edited collections and working papers series.