Transatlantic Disbelonging
Book • 2025
Bimbola Akinbola's Transatlantic Disbelonging examines contemporary visual, performance, and literary work by Nigerian diasporic women to argue that alienation can be enacted as a generative practice she terms 'disbelonging.
' The book traces how artists such as Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Zina Saro-Wiwa, ruby onyinyechi amanze, and Nnedi Okorafor use unruliness, the erotic, taboo, pleasure, and play to craft forms of homemaking and community beyond conventional notions of return and longing.
Akinbola centers agency, showing how these creative practices reconfigure belonging as tethered, ambivalent, and experientially rich rather than solely loss-driven.
Drawing on interdisciplinary methods and artist interviews, the book highlights how world-building and speculative practices transform present lived realities for diasporic women.
It positions disbelonging as both strategy and affective mode that reshapes diasporic identity formation and cultural belonging.
' The book traces how artists such as Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Zina Saro-Wiwa, ruby onyinyechi amanze, and Nnedi Okorafor use unruliness, the erotic, taboo, pleasure, and play to craft forms of homemaking and community beyond conventional notions of return and longing.
Akinbola centers agency, showing how these creative practices reconfigure belonging as tethered, ambivalent, and experientially rich rather than solely loss-driven.
Drawing on interdisciplinary methods and artist interviews, the book highlights how world-building and speculative practices transform present lived realities for diasporic women.
It positions disbelonging as both strategy and affective mode that reshapes diasporic identity formation and cultural belonging.
Mentioned by
Mentioned in 0 episodes
Mentioned by ![undefined]()
Abigail Sellis
Bimbola Akinbola, "Transatlantic Disbelonging: Unruliness, Pleasure, and Play in Nigerian Diasporic Women's Art" (Duke UP, 2025)
