Title: War and the destabilising effect of Black girlhood in Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) and Danzy Senna's Caucasia (1998).
This presentation argues for a reading of Brown Girl, Brownstones and Caucasia as novels which share a commitment to complex representations of black girlhood. Dr King examines how black girlhood functions as a destabilising force within adult-world conflicts and how black girls question the structures of the world they inhabit. Engaging theories of childhood, racialisation, and feminism, Dr King concludes that these texts accomplish two representational feats: they centre black girlhood in narratives of U.S. identities, and they capture the agency of children in actively shaping their worlds before their own adulthood arrives.
Bio: Dr Nicole King is the author of C. L. R. James and creolization: circles of influence (University of Mississippi Press, 2001), and lectures at Goldsmiths University, London, where her current research is concerned with the literary representations of children, young adults, blackness and modernity in the United States and the Americas. She is widely published, and her current book project, Black Childhood in Modern African American Fiction, offers a comparative historical analysis of racialisation and young people in novels and short stories from the mid-20th century onwards.
Please use the following Eventbrite link for this seminar, taking place on 8th October at 5pm on Teams.
To help us manage numbers for this event, please register via Eventbrite.
Registered attendees will be sent the Teams link the day before the lecture.
For more information regarding this event please contact catherine.gander(at)mu.ie