Imagined Ecologies: The Body-Place Paradigm of the African Diaspora

• In Event: Ecological perspective through women writers

Description for Program

In Samantha Pinto’s book Difficult Diasporas: The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic, she writes about Ama Ata Aidoo’s seminal play Dilemma of A Ghost. She writes that the play does not provide a solution. Still, it shows us “how to reconcile history as much as how to incorporate the partial common uneven modes of contact and cooperation between different bodies and geographies into our practices of reading diaspora”(99). This intervention is critical for studying African and African Diaspora women’s literature. To “read diaspora,” one must be attuned to the constructed narratives about space and bodies circulating between Africa and the diaspora. This presentation takes Black women writers seriously as theorists and practitioners of African Diaspora epistemologies.
Ama Ata Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy (1977)and Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982) center Black women protagonists whose journeys navigate the terrain of personal and collective histories shaped by colonialism, patriarchy, and systemic violence. By examining these works through their epistolary form, this presentation illuminates theorizations of diaspora, gender, and knowledge production as critical to forming transnational solidarity. Through epistolary and fragmented narrative forms, Aidoo and Walker craft an aesthetic of memory that transcends linear storytelling, creating space for healing, agency, and transformation.
Drawing on theories of diaspora, memory, and transnational feminism, this presentation situates these texts within a broader discourse on how Black women’s literary aesthetics function as a site for reclaiming literature and imagining liberatory futures for Black women. It empowers narrative aesthetics to assert the enduring legacies of Black women’s voices in African and African Diaspora literature.

Author

• Angelica Johnson