Gannon’s paper, “Agency and Creation of Space: Empowered Women in the Gothic Fictions Mexican Gothic聽and Build Your House Around My Body,” is part of a project mentored by Professor of English Rosemary Haskell. The research investigates 21st-century adaptations of the eighteenth-century Gothic mode, with a particular focus on the changing representations of women characters and the spaces they inhabit in their novels. “Mexican Gothic” is by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and “Build Your House Around My Body” is by Violet Kupersmith.

The paper, “The Impaired and Disabled Fat Detective: Ann Cleeves’s Inspector Vera Stanhope and the聽 `Defective Detective’ Fictional Tradition,” interprets the 10 novels in the Vera Stanhope series from a combined disabilities and feminist fat studies perspective.

Throughout the series (1999-2022), Cleeves consistently demonstrates how Vera capitalizes professionally on her physical and psychological impairments and their consequent personal and social disabilities. The fat, ugly, late middle-aged police inspector is a professional success in a world where gender, class and workplace expectations would seem to handicap her.

Professor of English Rosemary Haskell presented “Impairments, Handicaps, and Their Meanings: Disabled Migrants to France in Fatou Diome’s Fictions” at the Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900 in Louisville, Kentucky, on Feb. 25.

Senegalese francophone novelist Fatou Diome’s novels about migration, when read from a disabilities studies perspective, anatomize her heroines not merely as socially liminal Black migrants to the White metropolitan French center, but as troubled psyches fragmented by obsessive returns to childhood miseries. “Impossible de Grandir”聽(2013) [Impossible to Grow Up], in particular, explores vividly the migrant woman’s personal impairment, disability, and consequent social and civic handicaps.

The disabilities studies perspective also helps to unravel Diome’s portrayal of the cultural and historical shapers of these individual impairments, while the depiction of the migrant’s postcolonial Senegalese home inevitably tracks with the trope of disability, particularly given the novel’s often bitter analyses of Senegal’s patriarchal, parochial, theocratic and materialistic culture.

This paper, presented in a session called “On Queer Time: Velocities and Temporalities in Contemporary French and Francophone Cultural Production,” argued that Diome’s 2006 novel “K茅tala,”听the story of queer lives struggling to unfold in a hostile Senegalese culture,聽depicts the deadly pressures exerted on individual lives by heteronormative timelines and illuminates the broader cultural implications of these delayed, disrupted and fugitive life stories.

Fatou Diome is the author of several novels, including “Le Ventre de l’Atlantique,” very successfully translated as “The Belly of the Atlantic,” two short-story collections, and two polemics against the French “far-right” political wing. Diome has lived in France since the early 1990s.

Haskell writes that the stories are generally about Diome’s favorite character types: the threshold or borderline people who strive to get a foothold in hostile or at least unwelcoming societies.

Diome has also published several novels, among them the very successful “Le Ventre de l’Atlantique”聽(English:聽The Belly of the Atlantic), which explores the precarious careers of young men from Senegal who try to succeed as soccer players on European teams.

Diome, a migrant from the west African country to France, departs from her usual migrant themes to explore in fiction the personal and national grief suffered when the Joola ferry sank off the coast of Senegal in 2002,聽 with the loss of thousands of lives.

The novel’s heroine, Coumba, widowed by the shipwreck, addresses her grief through her nightly imaginary excursions to the spirit world of the nearby island of Sangomar. Something of an artist figure, she captures these encounters through her writing. As she does so, she gradually moves towards the new stage in her life that awaits her once the period of mourning required by her Islamic faith is over.

Read the full review .

An article by Professor of English Rosemary Haskell recently appeared in The Minnesota Review: A Journal of Creative and Critical Writing.

Haskell’s article, “Migritude’s Progress: Fatou Diome’s Twenty-Five Years in Afrique(s)-sur-Rhine,” analyzes francophone Senegalese novelist Fatou Diome’s explorations in novels and in nonfiction of “migritude,” the rich conceptualization of the complexities of Black African identity in the context of the exciting and perilous migrant’s condition.

Fatou Diome, born in Senegal in 1968, now lives in France. She has published several novels, including the best-selling “Le ventre de l’Atlantique” (translated into English as “The Belly of the Atlantic”), about boys and young men risking their lives by migrating to Europe from Senegal in the hope of playing soccer in the “big leagues.”

The article is available here – .

The Minnesota Review, Issue 94, 2020 (New Series),聽 pp. 142-156.

Rosemary Haskell, professor of English, recently chaired a session titled “The Rhetoric of Contact Between Military and Civilian Life” at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association Annual Meeting, held Nov. 16 in Atlanta.

Haskell also presented a paper at this conference session: “The Power Vacuum: Two Kinds of `Inner Emigration’ in Ben Fountain’s ‘Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.'”

Fountain’s 2012 novel explores the experiences of a group of young U. S. soldiers as they are feted during the half-time show at a Dallas Cowboys’ football game for their now-famous, but deadly, firefight at the battle-front in Iraq.

“Senegal in France, France in Senegal: Successful  and Failed Transnational Identities in Fatou Diome’s Novels” appears in a special issue of the journal devoted to “Black Transnationalism.” 

The article is available .