The figure of the (African) mother can be found in numerous literary productions both by African post-independence as well as African diasporic writers. In such contexts, motherly figures serve a plethora of functions. The mother can act as a national allegory (Elleke Boehmer 2005), as a supreme symbol of motherly love, affection and care (Marie Umeh 1982), or as a point of opposition in the emancipatory processes of identify formation of their daughter(s) (Marianne Hirsch 1989), as numerous studies have explored to date. Such representations, despite their diversity in both form and function, have one thing in common: they render the woman as mother silent. In such literary productions, motherly figures are written through the eyes and voices of others and thus often reduced to precisely their role and function as mother. This PhD project explores how recent works of fiction complicate such reductive, monolithic and often stereotypical representations of motherly figures by foregrounding the voices as well as (strategic) silences of African(a) mothers, including those on the verge of becoming, struggling or refusing to be(come) mothers, who are often excluded or marginalized in discourses on motherhood. In doing so, it aims to bring to the fore the ambivalences and contradictions inherent in the motherly experience.

• WiSe 2022/23: Narrative Analysis: Postmodern and Postcolonial Short Fiction (Übung)
• SoSe 2023: African Diasporic Fiction (Proseminar)
• SoSe 2023: Narrative Analysis: Short Fiction of the African Diaspora (Übung)
• WiSe 2023/24: Enslavement in African American Literature (Proseminar)
• SoSe 2024: Cultural Analysis: Intersectional Approaches to TV Analysis (Übung)
• WiSe 2024/25: Haunted Houses, Ghosts of the Past: Postcolonial Hauntings in Anglophone Fiction and Film (Proseminar)
• WiSe 2024/25: Narrative Analysis: Hauntings in Anglophone Short Fiction (Übung)

E-Mail: nadine.ellinger@philhist.uni-augsburg.de

Room No. D-4502