Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic Women’s Writing: Making Love, Making Worlds

Abstract

Love has recently attracted a good deal of attention from scholars in different fields of social sciences. Successfully bringing love into dialogue with spatial studies in Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic Women’s Writing: Making Love, Making Space, Jennifer Leetsch relates Black love to space with a focus on diaspora, migration, identity, memory, affect, and intimacy studies. This book explores how the female characters in contemporary African diasporic women writers’ works “opened up possible and still unexplored new pathways... [for] imagining be/longing-together, being-withanother” (262) by adopting what Leetsch calls the “strategies of ‘we-forming’ and ‘wesustaining’” (265). African diasporic women’s literature, as the book thus highlights, indicates “new possibilities of living in an ever-more mobile, globalised twentyfirst-century world” (1). The four chapters, excluding the introduction and the conclusion, analyze five contemporary women writers of the African diaspora, highlighting the potential of their works to imagine an alternative way of world-making through envisioning a radical affective and relational possibility. The argument in each chapter is shaped in a tripartite structure that gives the author enough scope to analyze individual works in detail: the first part focuses on the space with which the Black female protagonists develop affective attachment, and which also becomes central to imagining a transformative love; the second part elaborates on the textual strategies, which by directing attention at themselves, foreground the affective and relational possibilities eventually unfolding in the narrative; the third one—and this is the most gripping, powerful, and complex part of each chapter— develops the romantic potential of the texts by linking affect and longing with the spatial dimension related earlier. Focusing on four different spaces, these chapters collectively “bear witness to the different geographical and affective border crossings” (204). While primarily engaging with postcolonial theories, Black love, and affect studies, based on the context of the attachment it deals with, Leetsch additionally draws upon a different set of theories specific to its purpose in each chapter. Only the second chapter depicts a conventional, heteronormative love story with a happy ending: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah. Leetsch brings out the connection between longing and belonging by underlining how the protagonists’ “transnational travels were supplemented by other emotional travels” (57): the emotional bond between the protagonists maturates over time and space as they migrate to the West and subsequently return home to Nigeria. However, Leetsch