Abstract
Originally defined as an Anglo-American phenomenon, starting with Helen Fielding’s best-selling novel Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996), chick lit has spread rapidly across various linguistic and cultural markets. There is a broad consensus that this is a transfer from the centre to the periphery, from the original genre to numerous adapted subgenres and variations. For the latter, the problematic term “‘ethnic’ chick lit,” which in the broadest sense includes all chick lit by authors with non-Western sociocultural backgrounds, has become established. The implicit (re-vision, recovery) and explicit (circulation, collage) comparative strategies introduced by Susan Stanford Friedman serve as a methodological framework for analysing such practices of ethnic labelling. These strategies are applied not through a close reading of primary literature but through a distant reading, or rather comparison, of the Anglo-American chick-lit label with two of its socalled “ethnic” subgenres or variations: African-American and African chick lit. A re-visioning of Anglo-American chick lit through a recovery of African-American chick lit, as well as a focus on the label’s circulation in Africa, resulting in a collage of African chick lit, demonstrates that the label’s dissemination was not as linear as has been suggested by the dominant discourse of chick lit gone global.
