| dc.description.abstract | Narrative Nomads: Resistance in the 21st-Century African Hispanophone analyzes contemporary narratives from Equatorial Guinea and the Western Sahara, two former Spanish colonies in Africa. In the decades since the end of Spanish colonial presence, Equatorial Guinea and the Western Sahara have experienced considerable violence, political repression, and censorship. The dictatorial (Equatorial Guinea) and colonial (Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara) regimes in power invest heavily in monolithic narratives of national and cultural identity, and international news media often reproduce these reductive images. Narrative Nomads asks what can be learned by turning to the cultural productions of the understudied younger generations of Equatoguineans and Sahrawis. Equatorial Guinea attained independence in 1968, and Spain withdrew from the Western Sahara by mid-1976. Hence, those born after 1976 came of age in the years after Spanish colonization, and many experienced first-hand the hope ignited by the local economic and political events of the 1990s—specifically, the discovery of Equatoguinean petroleum and the UN-sponsored Sahrawi-Moroccan ceasefire and anticipated independence referendum. Narrative Nomads incorporates approaches from postcolonial studies, African studies, gender and sexuality studies, and visual studies, and it brings together cultural productions from Spanish-speaking Africa —prose, hip-hop music, graphic narrative, and film. Narrative Nomads traces the fluid positionality of Sahrawi and Equatoguinean texts that contest dominant discourses of belonging and resist multifarious manifestations of power and violence. I contend that these works produce narratives of “nomadic resistance” because they unsettle dichotomic notions of oppression and opposition as they traverse ideological, geopolitical, linguistic, economic, and genre borders. | |
