Difficult Diasporas

Difficult Diasporas charts a dazzlingly fecund constellation of black feminist literature by Anglophone writers from the US, the UK, the Caribbean, and Africa. Pinto reads an archive of & stray companions, a disparate array of writers linked less by influence, lineage, or geography than an adamant contention that the only literature adequate to the historical dislocation of diaspora is a literature that is formally dislocateda literature of radical experimentation, even opacity and disorder. Poised at the crossroads between literary innovation and transnational culture, Difficult Diasporas will be known as a model of what it means to read for a feminist poetics of diaspora. ~Brent Hayes Edwards,author of The Practice of Diaspora

There are lessons to be learned from this study. ~The Journal of African American History

The central idea of Samantha Pintos Difficult Diasporasis simple in a good way and worthy of pursuit. ~Wasafiri

By illustrating carefully the core contradictions of diaspora that fail to address problems of representation and nonnormative experiences for black women adequately and critically, Pinto provides an important and necessary venue to place gender at the center of aesthetic and formal representations of diaspora. ~Contemporary Women's Writing

In its richness of content and advancement of the fields of African diaspora and feminist studies,Difficult Diasporasproves that such risks can yieldgroundbreaking scholarship. ~Gender, Place, & Culture