Asha Jeffers is Associate Professor of English and Gender and Women's Studies at Dalhousie University. Her research focuses on literature about the children of immigrants across national and ethnic lines. She is coeditor of The Daughters of Immigrants: A Multidisciplinary Study.

"Against! balances a necessary critique of families invested in the turning of their offspring into status and profit with a necessary empathy for those ancestors who, themselves, had been so ruthlessly made. Jeffers's affect work theorizes pain without being fueled by it, able to evade the sentimental and anti-sentimental traps common to symptomatic readings. This is important scholarship and bold literary criticism." --erin Khuê Ninh, author of Passing for Perfect: College Impostors and Other Model Minorities

"Against! makes a significant intervention into gender studies and diasporic literature and redirects the conversation around Caribbean American fiction. Jeffers demonstrates how rebellious immigrant daughter characters push back against 'respectability' and organize their subjectivity within and against model-minority discourse." --Angeletta KM Gourdine, author of The Difference Place Makes: Gender, Sexuality, and Diaspora Identity

"Jeffers offers a theoretically engaged yet accessible presentation of how four diasporic novels explore their African and Afro-Caribbean protagonists' rebellions against the familial, racial, geographical, cultural, and gendered vortexes that threaten their individuality. Jeffers's multilayered, densely crafted analysis sets itself apart from the prevailing, stereotypically racial and gendered discussions of four dynamic women writers. This provocative text engagingly advances conversations around--and scholarship of--novels about African and Afro-Caribbean women's experiences in their ancestral homelands and the diaspora." --Joyce A. Joyce, author of Black Studies as Human Studies: Critical Essays and Interviews

Publisher: Ohio State University Press

Pub date: 2025-01-17

Length: 160 pages