Comparing second generation children of immigrants in black Canadian and black British women’s writing, Settling Down and Settling Up extends discourses of diaspora and postcolonialism by expanding recent theory on movement and border crossing. While these concepts have recently gained theoretical currency, this book argues that they are not always adequate frameworks through which to understand second generation children who wish to reside "in place" in the nations of their birth.

Considering migration and settlement as complex, interrelated processes that inform each other across multiple generations and geographies, Andrea Katherine Medovarski challenges the gendered constructions of nationhood and diaspora with a particular focus on Canadian and British black women writers, including Dionne Brand, Esi Edugyan, and Zadie Smith. Re-evaluating gender and spatial relations, Settling Down and Settling Up argues that local experiences, often conceptualized through the language of the feminine and the domestic in black women’s writings, are no less important than travel and border crossings.

Andrea Katherine Medovarski is Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities at York University.

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"Particularly valuable in Medovarski’s work is her conceptualization of the second generation in terms of its expansion of the "conditions of possibility" (a concept borrowed from Michel de Certeau). In other words, Medovarski conceives of the second generation not just as a resistant force, but instead as a transformative one that can work to "remake citizenship on other, more ethical or more inclusive terms" and thereby create nations that are "‘more’ than they currently are." Medovarski takes her cue from a wonderful selection of texts, intervening nicely into already established discourses surrounding some of the more well-known texts."

Canadian Literature, August 2020