Synopsis "Telling it Slant: Critical Approaches to Helen Oyeyemi"
This collection develops a body of research around critically acclaimed author Helen Oyeyemi, putting her in dialogue with other contemporary writers and tracing her relationship with other works and literary traditions. Spanning the settings and cultural traditions of Britain, Nigeria, and the Caribbean, her work highlights the interconnected histories and cultures wrought by multiple waves of enslavement, colonization, and migration. Oyeyemi's work engages in an innovative way with gothic literature, reworking the tropes of a Western Gothic tradition in order to examine the fraught process of establishing identity in a postcolonial context. She is also a trouble-making feminist voice, employing feminist strategies to rewrite genres, parody literary forms, and critique the characterization of 'woman' in literature. Oyeyemi's oeuvre marks a new direction in postcolonial studies: The binarizing model of writing back famously advocated in Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin's seminal study &; The Empire Writes Back (1989) &; does not hold for her work. Neither does Oyeyemi's work celebrate the utopian potential of what Homi Bhabha terms 'Third Spaces' in multicultural societies. Instead, Oyeyemi foregrounds enduring colonial legacies referenced through the physical and psychological trauma associated with migration, displacement, racism, and contested national identities. This collection brings together a range of intersecting critical approaches in a timely investigation of Oyeyemi's literary output.
