While the male-dominated Francophone African migrant literary tradition includes women writers, there is no study that attends to this subgroup of writers. The Pull of Postcolonial Nationhood: Gender and Migration in Francophone African Literatures pioneers the study of these writers as a category through an examination of three major women who exemplify the Francophone African female migrant literary tradition: Ken Bugul, Calixthe Beyala, and Fatou Diome. By studying these women together, Ayo A. Coly innovatively introduces gender into prevailing theories of Francophone African migrant literatures. These theories, in line with the current surge of postnationalism in cultural criticism, claim that questions of home and nationhood are obsolete for the present generation of Francophone African migrant writers, but this book shows that the opposite is true in the texts of these writers. Coly is thus able to demonstrate how claims of postnationalism are often skewed by gender-blind understandings of nationalism, namely a failure to consider that women have traditionally been the sites for discourses and practices of nationalism. Amid the negative currency of home and nation in contemporary cultural criticism, including postcolonial criticism, this book contends that home remains a politically, ideologically, and emotionally loaded matter for postcolonial subjects.

Ayo A. Coly is assistant professor of comparative literature and African studies at Dartmouth College.

Chapter 1 Introduction: Of Uprooted and Deterritorialized Africans
Part 2 Part I. Ken Bugul: From Self-Imposed Exile to Constrained Homecoming
Chapter 3 Chapter 1: The (non)Place of the Daughter of the Postcolonial House: Le Baobab fou and Cendres et braises
Chapter 4 Chapter 2: No Place Like the (non)Place: Striving to Come Home in Cendres et braises and Riwan ou le chemin de sable
Part 5 Part II. Calixthe Beyala: The Conflicted Immigrant Standpoint
Chapter 6 Chapter 3: Aborted Postnationalism? C'est le soleil qui m'a brûlée and Tu t'appelleras Tanga
Chapter 7 Chapter 4: (Un)Writing France as Home: The Belleville Novels
Chapter 8 Chapter 5: From African Guest to Afro-French Hostess: Producing an Acceptable Immigrant Geography of Home in Amours Sauvages
Part 9 Part III. Fatou Diome: The Anti-Immigrant Standpoint
Chapter 10 Chapter 6: Globalization and the Revival of the Anticolonial and Nationalist narrative of Home: La préférence nationale and Le ventre de l'Atlantique
Chapter 11 Chapter 7: Bounded Homelessness as a Strategy: La préférence nationale and Le ventre de l'Atlantique
Chapter 12 Conclusion: Reinstating the Nation as an object of Postcolonially Correct Interest