Transatlantic Disbelonging: Unruliness, Pleasure, and Play in Nigerian Diasporic Women's Art

by Bimbola Akinbola

Overview

In Transatlantic Disbelonging, Bimbola Akinbola redirects the focus in diaspora studies from questions of loss and longing to acts of unapologetic self-definition through the study of Nigerian diasporic women artists navigating disparate geographies, allegiances, and identities. Drawing on the work of contemporary visual and performance artists, experimental filmmakers, and writers—including Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Zina Saro-Wiwa, ruby onyinyechi amanze, and Nnedi Okorafor—Akinbola articulates how these artists use their experiences as cultural outsiders to redefine home and national belonging on their own terms. Taking a capacious interdisciplinary approach, she explores how these women employ anti-respectability, taboo, the erotic, and play to challenge oppressive colonial legacies and expectations pertaining to gender and morality. For the artists in this book, their artmaking is a form of homemaking that embraces ambivalence and reinvents alienation as possibility. Theorizing these practices as acts of “disbelonging,” Akinbola radically reimagines diasporic identity formation, illustrating how artists use creative practices to enact and embody belonging and community in expansive ways.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478061410
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	09/05/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	22 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Bimbola Akinbola is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University.

Table of Contents

Preface  vii
Acknowledgments  xi
Introduction. Disbelonging: A Strategy for Our Collective Survival  1
1. Nostalgic Longing and Unruly Return in the Art of Wura-Natasha Ogunji  27
2. Ambivalent Interracial Longing in I Always Face You, Even When It Seems Otherwise (2012), Thread (2012), The Bridge (2010), and Re-branding My Love (2011)  61
3. Erotic Agency and African Intimacy in the Work of Zina Saro-Wiwa  83
4. Queer Diasporic Girlhood in The Adventures of Ada the Alien and Akata Witch  105
Conclusion. Redefining Belonging vis-à-vis Tethering  137
Notes  149
Bibliography  161
Index

Editorial Reviews

“Highlighting the complexity of Nigerian identity, Transatlantic Disbelonging collaborates with artists and writers to create a book that is simultaneously groundbreaking and devastatingly beautiful. An interdisciplinary, multimethod tour de force that thinks through national belonging and diasporic homemaking, the book addresses the need to center queer desires in African visual and literary culture. Nuanced, innovative, and poetic, Transatlantic Disbelonging brilliantly outlines vibrant, indigenous world-making practices that emerge out of new relationalities between black artists, spirit, and the precarious environment we live in.”
-- Hershini Bhana Young, author of Falling, Floating, Flickering: Disability and Differential Movement in African Diasporic Performance

“This innovative and poetic book makes a strong case for paying more attention to how artists in the diaspora use their artistic practices to effectively navigate their in-betweenness and queer notions of what constitutes ‘home.’ Bimbola Akinbola shows how Nigerian women artists refute the prototypical narrative of so-called tragic ‘return’ and instead reframe their displacement as an opportunity to create queer communities and refuse to be silenced by notions of what an artist, particularly a Nigerian woman, can represent or perform in public spaces.”
-- Uri McMillan, author of Mavericks of Style: The Seventies in Color

"Transatlantic Disbelonging is a world-tilting text that shines a light on the rigor of Nigerian women’s art history. . . . These artists are central to the global contemporary art world, where Black women’s experimental aesthetic practices are formative rather than marginal; Akinbola’s book gives these practices the rigorous attention they merit."
-- Alexandra M. Thomas Hyperallergic

From the Publisher