Black feminism in a neoliberal world: resistance in contemporary black women's fiction

This thesis explores representations of black women’s resistance portrayed in fiction and poetry by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dionne Brand, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Edwidge Danticat and Taiye Selasi published between 1991–2018. I consider the ways their black women characters enact resistance to the economic, political and social structures of neoliberal capitalism which systematically constrain, oppress, exploit and even murder them. I assert that intersectionally feminist ways of reading black women’s writing contributes to exposing and challenging unequal power structures. I develop a transnational black feminist way of reading which is applicable to the cross-border experiences within each text, and the affinities I see between the authors I consider. I am interested in the kinds of solidarity the authors imagine in their work, as well as the rapport and tensions between their distinctive literary renditions of black women’s experiences. The heterogenous fictional narratives I focus on allow me to expansively analyse the class, economic and regional boundaries that make creating black feminist solidarity difficult work. My outlook is transnational and global; however, resistance within local contexts remains fundamental. I explore the author’s writing centrally by focusing on the literary articulation of the body, which both exposes constraint and complicity with, and performs and embodies different kinds of resistance to, neoliberal capitalist regimes. I argue that the texts expose the complex interrelation of neoliberalism, gender inequality and anti-black violence. Ultimately, I suggest that acts of resistance carried out by fictional black women become applicable and revolutionary to the way we live in the material world. The literature I explore contributes to a model for transformative social justice through the aesthetic creation of a radical transnational black feminism.