About

Njeri Githire is an Associate Professor in the Department of African American & African Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on African artistic and cultural production, as well as African diasporic studies. She is engaged in exploring the diverse expressions of African culture and their impacts within the broader context of the African diaspora, contributing to the understanding of cultural dynamics and artistic practices across the continent and its global communities.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• History
• Aesthetics
• Art
• Law

Selected publications

• Eating Bodies: Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones

  Research in African Literatures · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Aesthetics

  ABSTRACT: This essay exposes the imagery of cannibalism as a critique of unfettered consumption and greed at the root of the exploitative structures in The Farming of Bones (1998). The essay contends that the symbolic tapestry of Edwidge Danticat’s second novel is woven around metaphors of consumption and excretion. In a bid to unpack the inner workings of a plantation system that reduced human beings to commodities, I tease out the novel’s layered reflection on these metaphors and their meaning. I demonstrate that the purported menace posed by Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic is but a deflection of the violence exerted on working bodies on a constant basis. A scheme that serves to mask the assault and plunder that are commonplace, the ascription of malevolent intent onto the immigrants strips them of their humanity and justifies their expulsion from the national territory. I further expose the strategies used by the exploited to counter the consuming carnage and restore dignity.

  PublisherDOI

• Eating Bodies: Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones

  Research in African Literatures · 2023 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Aesthetics

  ABSTRACT: This essay exposes the imagery of cannibalism as a critique of unfettered consumption and greed at the root of the exploitative structures in The Farming of Bones (1998). The essay contends that the symbolic tapestry of Edwidge Danticat’s second novel is woven around metaphors of consumption and excretion. In a bid to unpack the inner workings of a plantation system that reduced human beings to commodities, I tease out the novel’s layered reflection on these metaphors and their meaning. I demonstrate that the purported menace posed by Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic is but a deflection of the violence exerted on working bodies on a constant basis. A scheme that serves to mask the assault and plunder that are commonplace, the ascription of malevolent intent onto the immigrants strips them of their humanity and justifies their expulsion from the national territory. I further expose the strategies used by the exploited to counter the consuming carnage and restore dignity.

  PublisherDOI

• Hunger and Irony in the French Caribbean: Literature, Theory, and Public Life, by Nicole Simek

  New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids · 2019-06-07

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This compelling and timely study proposes to read "hunger and irony together, as mutually elucidating and complicating terms" (p.2).From the outset, however, Nicole Simek acknowledges the moral dilemma that an appraisal of irony ("a trope associated with playfulness, ambiguity, or deception") alongside hunger ("a threat to biological survival") would evoke (p. 2), if not explained through the capacity of irony to deploy the analytical potential of hunger.To achieve her authoritative pairing of this seemingly incompatible match and unravel a twist that is both ironic and fittingly accurate, she analyzes a diverse range of genres and forms, including "fiction, essay, manifesto, and photography" (p.3).In twinning hunger and irony as critical tools to interrogate the complex and often dire concerns that suffuse the literature of Guadeloupe and Martinique, she builds on recent studies that have evaluated configurations of politics and aesthetics in discourses relating to food, consumption, hunger, and domination in the Caribbean literary imagination.She also acknowledges studies that invoke cannibalism as a dominant critical trope, a crucial site for Caribbean cultural identity and literary criticism.The book builds on Simek's previous work on the act of reading as consumptive practice and the interpretive ethics that undergird any engagement with Maryse Condé's varied oeuvre.Not surprisingly, then, Condé's works dominate the list of texts sampled, along with writings by Patrick Chamoiseau.Chapter 1 introduces the principal theoretical concepts bolstering her critical enterprise.Anchoring Hunger and Irony in paradigms deriving as much from Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Édouard Glissant, and Slavoj Žižek as from postcolonial criticism more broadly, Simek grounds the study's persuasive argument in the varying registers and competing interpretations that can be ascribed to the deployment of hunger and irony in selected texts of the Francophone Caribbean tradition.Chapter 2 reads Condé's Histoire de la femme cannibale (2003) along with Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnifique (1988) in a move that underscores both novels as detective narratives.She centers her inquiry in the meanings that theorizing can help clarify, rightly identifying the scribal encroachment on oral culture that propels Solibo forward-a "parasite's hunger"-as an ironic "hunger for relationality" (p.29).Simek concludes that Condé "brings irony to bear on the hunger of both artist and reader as it sets the question of literature's purpose within a tale of cannibalistic appetites" (p.30).Chapter 3 seeks to evaluate the political function of literature through an examination of Chamoiseau's Écrire en pays dominé (1997) alongside Gisèle

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Edible Écriture

  University of Illinois Press eBooks · 2017-04-20

  book1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter links the themes of cannibals, pirates, and colonial conquest of islands to the consumption of literary texts as a commodity embedded within paradigms of domination and control. It specifically explores <italic>Comme un vol de papang</italic>' by Monique Agénor and <italic>La montagne des signaux</italic> by Marie-Thérèse Humbert, and relates these texts to questions of island specificity as base for discussion. The reading of Agénor's <italic>Comme un vol de papang</italic>' underscores the movement and dispersal of peoples within the Indian Ocean, and more precisely on the formation of the Afro-Malagasy diaspora in the Reunion Island. The reading of Humbert's <italic>La montagne des signaux</italic> explores the representation of the tourist as a power-hungry conqueror whose appetite for spectacle and illusion can only be sated by appropriation and more appropriation. Through an exploration of women writers, the chapter also highlights the gendering of the desert-island story as a male-centered text.

  PublisherDOI

• Dis(h)coursing Hunger

  University of Illinois Press eBooks · 2017-04-20

  book1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter examines the use of the trope of hunger in Lindsey Collen's <italic>There is a Tide</italic> (1990) and <italic>Mutiny</italic> (2001) to dispel the myth of Mauritius as a model of paradise that permeates historical, travel, and literary writing. In these texts, the plight of characters debilitated by lack of nourishment, literally and metaphorically, and symbolically consumed by the ravenous, parasitic apotheoses of capitalist market relations points to cannibalism as the ultimate act of domination. Specifically, Collen draws an analogy between the historic slavery that had been the economic basis of the island as a plantation colony, and contemporary economic processes that commodify bodies in the production of consumable goods. In this general scenario of cannibalistic cravings that threaten the autonomy of physical and national bodies, the predicament of the Chagossians (or Chagos Islanders)—forcibly displaced to Mauritius after their island was expropriated and turned into a strategic lynchpin for U.S. military operations in the Middle East and the wider Indian Ocean region—evokes territorial appropriation as spatial cannibalism par excellence. The chapter also highlights the newer forms of cannibal intent that continue to define islands' contact and subsequent negotiations with consumer culture.

  PublisherDOI

• Cannibal Love

  University of Illinois Press eBooks · 2017-04-20

  book1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter examines the juxtaposition of cannibalism and sexual appetites in Maryse Condé's <italic>Histoire de la femme cannibale</italic> (hereinafter referred to as <italic>Story</italic>, reflecting the 2007 English translation) and Andrea Levy's <italic>Small Island</italic> (2004). It argues that while the ideologically fraught figure of the cannibal has long offered a fertile ground on which to construct a counter-hegemonic aesthetic of Caribbean discourses, few if any writers explore the equation between two major constructs—the sexual and alimentary transgressions—that define the cannibal. <italic>Story</italic> and <italic>Small Island</italic> evidence that (post)imperial panics have consistently framed a range of (post)colonial conflicts in the vocabulary of alimentary and sexual deviance as a ploy to mask these very same appetites in the (neo)imperial venture. In <italic>Small Island</italic>, cannibalism is a hidden theme that lurks beneath the surface of seemingly mundane and insignificant moments of encounter. In <italic>Story</italic>, Condé deconstructs the presumed benevolence of France toward Guadeloupe through an astute critique of the dominant imagery of France as mother who nurtures and sustains her children.

  PublisherDOI

• Epilogue

  University of Illinois Press eBooks · 2017-04-20

  book1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. This book has attempted to show the return of the cannibal in contemporary Caribbean and Indian Ocean writing, a return that is as much thematic as it is historical, economic, and political. As an archetypal othering trope, cannibalism is considered the antithesis of cosmopolitan ideals, ideals that persistently appeal to the elite for whom international mobility is synonymous with modernity, style, and indulgence. These elitist models of global interactions marginalize the knowledge and wisdom from which Caribbean and Indian Ocean societies draw. Yet through the cannibalistic incorporation of Caribbean and Indian Ocean societies within networks that mark the global world, these societies continue to play a crucial role in processes of transculturation and in the broader processes of cosmopolitan exchanges. It is hoped is that this book has brought together select texts in ways that open up new research directions.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  University of Illinois Press eBooks · 2017-04-20

  book1st authorCorresponding

  This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book explores the preeminence of alimentary-related tropes—particularly cannibalism—and their political significance in the works of select Caribbean and Indian Ocean women writers. These women include Monique Agénor of the Reunion Island; Lindsey Collen, a Mauritian writer of South African background; Maryse Condé of Guadeloupe; Edwidge Danticat, an American writer whose Haitian roots inspire most of her works; Andrea Levy, an English writer of Jamaican descent; Marie-Thérèse Humbert of Mauritius; and Gisèle Pineau, a French writer of Guadeloupean parentage. These writers were chosen based on the significance they have given to metaphors of (non)eating and incorporation to express social, cultural, economic, and political processes through which relations of power are drawn and perpetuated.

  PublisherDOI

• Immigration, Assimilation, and Conflict

  University of Illinois Press eBooks · 2017-04-20

  book1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter examines the deployment of counter-incorporative strategies as a means to thwart potentially dangerous elements from entering the eating body. In particular, it examines how, through the language of disease and contamination that proliferates in the realm of immigration and its effect on culture, select national cultures are portrayed as under attack from foreigners and their filthy, debased bodies. Marked with cannibalism as the ultimate expression of savagery and human degradation, these bodies evoke anxiety and deep-seated fear of extinction in the national consciousness. Focusing on select texts by Edwidge Danticat, Andrea Levy, and Gisèle Pineau—works that have become entrenched in the canon of Caribbean women's writings thanks to their framing of food and eating as symbolic practices in diasporic identity formation—the chapter analyzes the national body as an ingesting, digesting, and excreting organism. It explores the twin phenomena of cannibalism, that is: taking in difference in order to neutralize its negative impacton the receiving body, and <italic>anthropemy</italic>—the elimination of sickening symptoms by vomiting the ingested foreign body.

  PublisherDOI

• Cannibal Writes: Eating Others in Caribbean and Indian Ocean Women's Writing

  Project Muse (Johns Hopkins University) · 2014-11-06 · 12 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Zo Norridge

  University of London

  6 shared

• Rabia Redouane

  5 shared

• Rachel Douglas

  University of Liverpool

  4 shared

• Dora Carpenter

  Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

  4 shared

• Marianne Durand

  Cheshire and Wirral Partnership NHS Foundation Trust

  2 shared

• Caroline Caron

  2 shared

• Peter Turberfield

  Toho University

  2 shared

• Yves Laberge

  2 shared