Professor Simone Alexander Awarded Book Prize
Thursday, April 16, 2015
African Diasporic Women's Narratives offers an in-depth study of literature, analyzing selective texts by the migrant writers Audre Lorde, Edwidge Danticat, Maryse Conde, and Grace Nichols. A multifaceted contribution to studies of gender, race, sexuality, and disability issues, African Diasporic Women's Narratives engages a range of issues as it grapples with the complex interconnectedness of geography, citizenship, and nationalism.
Extending beyond the boundaries of traditional literary analysis, Alexander focuses on the female body across a corpus of literary production in the Caribbean and elsewhere. Using feminist and womanist theory, she shows that over time, black women have used their bodily presence to complicate and challenge a migratory process often forced upon them by men or patriarchal society. She challenges the stereotypes ascribed to black female sexuality in literature, subverting its assumed definition as diseased, passive, or docile.
Alexander is the author of numerous articles and book chapters. Her multiple contributions to literature also include the monograph, Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women and the co-edited work, Feminist and Critical Perspectives on Caribbean Mothering.
Alexander has traveled across the globe, Europe (Spain, Portugal, France, Russia, Germany), Africa (Ghana, South Africa), North America and the Caribbean (Canada, Jamaica, Grenada, Barbados, Guadeloupe, St. Croix, St. Kitts, St. Lucia, Haiti, Puerto Rico, St. Martin/St. Maarten, Dominican Republic, Curaçao), and South and Central America (Belize, Surinam, Panama, Guyana, Argentina, Brazil) to present her work. Additionally, she has travelled across the nation as an invited lecturer. For five consecutive years, Alexander has been invited to the Annual Schomburg–Mellon Humanities Summer Institute, where she holds a seminar on Afro-Caribbean literature. The Harriman Institute, the Newark African Commission, the UNESCO Slave Routes Project, and the New Jersey Council for the Humanities have all invited Alexander as a speaker in various programs on the black diaspora, Caribbean narratives, and civil rights figures.
Alexander came to Seton Hall in 2001. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 2005 and to Full Professor in 2011.