About this Event
Please join us for the launch party for Dr. Asha Jeffers' book, Against! Rebellious Daughters in Black Immigrant Fiction in the United States. This event is a book launch party and a celebration of African diasporic literature and resistance. There will be a short talk, a Q&A, and a chance to mingle over refreshments to the tune of a playlist of rebellious daughter jams. Come for the intellectual stimulation, stay for the good vibes and snacks.
About Against!
Against! is the first book-length study of Afro-Caribbean and African immigrant and second-generation writing in the United States. In it, Asha Jeffers evaluates the relationship between Blackness and immigranthood in the US as depicted through the recurring theme of rebellious Black immigrant daughters. Considering the work of Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Taiye Selasi, Jeffers untangles how rebellion is informed by race, gender, ethnicity, and migration status.
About the author
Dr. Asha Jeffers is associate professor of English and Gender and Women’s Studies at Dalhousie University. Her research focuses on literature about the children of immigrants – the second generation – across national and ethnic lines. She is the author of Against! Rebellious Daughters in Black Immigrant Fiction in the United States and co-editor of The Daughters of Immigrants: A Multidisciplinary Study. Her scholarly work can be found in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Feminist Encounters, Canadian Literature, Critical Perspectives on David Chariandy, and South Asian Review.
Praise for Against!
“Against! balances a necessary critique of families invested in the turning of their offspring into status and profit with a necessary empathy for those ancestors who, themselves, had been so ruthlessly made. Jeffers’s affect work theorizes pain without being fueled by it, able to evade the sentimental and anti-sentimental traps common to symptomatic readings. This is important scholarship and bold literary criticism.” - erin Khuê Ninh, author of Passing for Perfect: College Impostors and Other Model Minorities
“Against! makes a significant intervention into gender studies and diasporic literature and redirects the conversation around Caribbean American fiction. Jeffers demonstrates how rebellious immigrant daughter characters push back against ‘respectability’ and organize their subjectivity within and against model-minority discourse.” - Angeletta KM Gourdine, author of The Difference Place Makes: Gender, Sexuality, and Diaspora Identity
“Jeffers offers a theoretically engaged yet accessible presentation of how four diasporic novels explore their African and Afro-Caribbean protagonists’ rebellions against the familial, racial, geographical, cultural, and gendered vortexes that threaten their individuality. Jeffers’s multilayered, densely crafted analysis sets itself apart from the prevailing, stereotypically racial and gendered discussions of four dynamic women writers. This provocative text engagingly advances conversations around—and scholarship of—novels about African and Afro-Caribbean women’s experiences in their ancestral homelands and the diaspora” - Joyce A. Joyce, author of Black Studies as Human Studies: Critical Essays and Interviews
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
A Different Booklist, 779 Bathurst Street, Toronto, Canada
CAD 0.00
