This book examines how women writers of colour, specifically those situated within Anglophone diasporic contexts, have played a significant role in the rewriting of women's friendships in literature, mainly by dismantling romanticised views of women as 'kindred spirits' or 'sisters' and of women's sociability as a primarily private affair. Through an interdisciplinary framework based on philosophical, sociological, and literary criticism, the book approaches the concept of women's friendship as a broad and flexible relational framework that encompasses diverse forms of female bonding. These relations are simultaneously personal, rooted in mutual affection and the situated knowledge of the other, and political, insofar as they acknowledge and interrogate the systems of power that naturalise antagonism, competition, and hierarchy between women. Foregrounding the intersecting axes of race, class, sexuality, culture, and nationality, among others, the book explores the conditions under which women form friendships in contemporary Anglophone contexts shaped by patriarchal, imperial, and neoliberal power structures, and the forms of solidarity and resistance that these connections nonetheless enable.

Advances research on female friendship, particularly representations of friendship written by women of colour Integrates literary, philosophical, psychological and sociological discourses Argues that writers of colour have helped to dismantle traditional views of women in their portrayals of friendship

Autorentext

Teresa Martínez-Quiles teaches contemporary British literature at the University of Alicante, Spain. Her primary research focus has been in the field of postcolonial feminist studies, with an emphasis on Anglophone literature written by Black and Asian women authors.

Inhalt

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Bonding across Racial and Class Boundaries: An Updated View of Confidante Friendship in Zadie Smith's NW and Swing Time.- Chapter 3: Moving Beyond the Dyad: A Conceptualisation of Triadic Female Friendship through Meera Syal's Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee and Leone Ross's All the Blood is Re.- Chapter 4: Crossing the Border: A Decolonial Perspective of Transnational Women's Relations in Meera Syal's The House of Hidden Mothers and Sefi Atta's The Bead Collector.- Chapter 5: Queer Friendships: A Resistance against 'Compulsory Heterosexuality' and the Patriarchal Oppression of Female Bodies of Colour in Nicole Dennis-Benn's Patsy and Sarah Thankam Mathews's All this Could be Different.- Chapter 6: Conclusions.