In Transatlantic Disbelonging, Bimbola Akinbola redirects the focus in diaspora studies from questions of loss and longing to acts of unapologetic self-definition through the study of Nigerian diasporic women artists navigating disparate geographies, allegiances, and identities. Drawing on the work of contemporary visual and performance artists, experimental filmmakers, and writers - including Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Zina Saro-Wiwa, ruby onyinyechi amanze, and Nnedi Okorafor - Akinbola articulates how these artists use their experiences as cultural outsiders to redefine home and national belonging on their own terms. Taking a capacious interdisciplinary approach, she explores how these women employ anti-respectability, taboo, the erotic, and play to challenge oppressive colonial legacies and expectations pertaining to gender and morality. For the artists in this book, their artmaking is a form of homemaking that embraces ambivalence and reinvents alienation as possibility. Theorizing these practices as acts of “disbelonging,” Akinbola radically reimagines diasporic identity formation, illustrating how artists use creative practices to enact and embody belonging and community in expansive ways.
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction. Disbelonging: A Strategy for Our Collective Survival 1
1. Nostalgic Longing and Unruly Return in the Art of Wura-Natasha Ogunji 27
2. Ambivalent Interracial Longing in I Always Face You, Even When It Seems Otherwise (2012), Thread (2012), The Bridge (2010), and Re-branding My Love (2011) 61
3. Erotic Agency and African Intimacy in the Work of Zina Saro-Wiwa 83
4. Queer Diasporic Girlhood in The Adventures of Ada the Alien and Akata Witch 105
Conclusion. Redefining Belonging vis-À-vis Tethering 137
Notes 149
Bibliography 161
Index
