ABSTRACT
Female authors of African descent, writing from all sides of the Atlantic and ranging from Toni Morrison to Saidyia Hartman, from Buchi Emecheta to Bernardine Evaristo, have formed a growing polyphonic chorus foregrounding the centrality of black female experience in envisaging history’s transformation from Euro-imperial enslavement, displacement, and migration into the postcolonial era. Pulling together an archive of black female voices across the Atlantic, they continue to foreground concepts such as roots, female kinship, and attachments between women as central for shaping a sense of self in a postcolonial Atlantic world. This chapter discusses, contextualizes, and historicizes these interventions, focusing on recent examples: Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016) alongside Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other (2019) and Manifesto. On Never Giving Up (2021). The chapter treats these texts as poignant examples of how “history” may be rendered salient as a polyphony of affective herstories and how this challenges current readers across the board into new ways of relating to African being and becoming, past and present.
