“Stubborn Beauty”: Africadian Women and Black Consciousness in George Elliott Clarke’s Where Beauty Survived

Mathias Iroro Orhero is a near-completion doctoral candidate whose primary research interests include Niger Delta and Black Maritime poetry, minority discourse, postcolonial studies, and world literature studies. His dissertation explores the colonial hegemony of nation-states and the production of minority subjectivity in Nigeria and Canada; specifically, he reads the aesthetics of minority discourse and how it reacts to state violence in the works of Tanure Ojaide, Ogaga Ifowodo, Sophia Obi, George Elliott Clarke, David Woods, and Sylvia Hamilton. A couple of his recent publications include “Epistemic Recuperation and Contemporary Reconfiguration of the Verbal Battle Tradition in the Poetry of Tanure Ojaide and Kofi Anyidoho,” in African Battle Traditions of Insult: Verbal Arts, Song-Poetry, and Performance, ed. Tanure Ojaide (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), pp. 263-80 and “Child Narrators, Conceptions of Reality, and Minority Identity in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road and Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach,” Postcolonial Text 17, no. 4 (2022). He is also the co-editor of a forthcoming special section of the Nordic Journal of African Studies.