Sex and Nation in Transatlantic Literatures

Nationalist and tribal cohesion in Ireland, South Africa, the US and elsewhere often relies on an absence of female and gender-nonconforming bodies in the public life. Staging a vital counter-narrative to global nationalist discourses, this book explores how 20th and 21st-century postcolonial literatures criticize hetero-normative definitions of nationhood across different geopolitical and cultural contexts. Szczeszak-Brewer delves into the metaphorical currency of male impotence and sexual aggression in nationalist narratives. She examines the place of gender-nonconforming characters in literature from Ireland, the US, Poland, France, Britain, South Africa and Senegal, in the work of writers including: James Joyce, Witold Gombrowicz, Jean Toomer, Bessie Head, Zoe Wicomb, J. M. Coetzee, Andrea Levy, Patrick McCabe and David Diop. Aligning queer and gender perspectives with discussions of white supremacy, this book examines the urgency for contemporary geopolitics to imagine new discourses of community against the backdrop of a rise in neo-nationalisms steeped in homophobic and misogynistic rhetoric.>

Préface
Explores transatlantic, postcolonial literatures that resist rigid definitions of national belonging and sexualities from Ireland and Senegal to South Africa, the US, and Poland

Auteur
Agata Szczeszak-Brewer is Professor of English and John P. Collett Chair in Rhetoric at Wabash College, USA where she teaches 20th-century World Literatures, Gender Studies, and Creative Writing. She has published two booksEmpire and Pilgrimage in Conrad and Joyce (2010) and Critical Approaches to Joseph Conrad (2015), as well as critical essays and creative nonfiction. She co-edited a special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies on Irish and South African literary and cultural intersections. Her 2023 memoir in essays The Hunger Book won the Gournay Prize.

Contenu
Acknowledgements Introduction: Writers Respond To Nationalisms' Gender Panic Chapter 1: James Joyce's Womanly Men Chapter 2: Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Nation, Proportion Chapter 3: Cross-Dressing Putos In Witold Gombrowicz's Trans-Atlantyk Chapter 4: Queering The South: Nation, Race, And Sex In Jean Toomer's Cane Chapter 5: States Of Emergency: Regulating Sex And Nation In Richard Rive's Fiction Chapter 6: South African Nationhood, Incest, And Miscegenation In Jm Coetzee's In The Heart Of The Country Chapter 7: Intimate Violence And Tribalism In Patrick Mccabe's Breakfast On Pluto Chapter 8:White Allyship And Narrative Dissonance In Andrea Levy's Small Island Chapter 9: Queering The Trenches In David Diop's At Night All Blood Is Black Conclusion: Looking Into The Future