Namwali Serpell

Also known as Carla Namwali Serpell, C. Namwali Serpell, C. N. Serpell, Serpell, Carla Namwali, Serpell, C. Namwali, Serpell, Namwali

Zambian-American scholar of English, feminist academic, and writer (born 1980)

Person · Open Library

Works: 8

Top works

On Morrison
The Best American Short Stories 2009
La deriva
La deriva
Double Men

via Open Library + Wikidata

Music · MusicBrainz

Type: Person
Active from: 1944-02-09

via MusicBrainz · CC0

Listeners · Last.fm

Listeners: 1
Total plays: 21

via Last.fm · Namwali Serpell

Recent publications · Crossref

5 total works indexed

The<i>Gaia</i>mission
· 2016 · cited 6,411x
Common core structure of amyloid fibrils by synchrotron X-ray diffraction 1 1Edited by F. E. Cohen
· 1997 · cited 1,550x
Distinct Tau Prion Strains Propagate in Cells and Mice and Define Different Tauopathies
· 2014 · cited 936x
Nucleated Conformational Conversion and the Replication of Conformational Information by a Prion Determinant
· 2000 · cited 867x
Alzheimer’s amyloid fibrils: structure and assembly
· 2000 · cited 828x

via Crossref · CC0

Quotes

“…partly because I’m perceived as black…the idea I could look at my mother and say to her that I’m not black makes no sense. To me, blackness is just part of what the family is.”
“I probably seem quite at ease now saying I’m mixed race, I’m black, I’m Zambian, but for a while that was quite torturous, quite angsty. As a young woman I wasn’t very tender or nice to myself…Now I’m older, I’m much more able to be tender and kind to the younger me that I see in the book.”
“…It's a very interesting position to be in as an immigrant to the United States - now a citizen - who grew up in a country where the word immigrant meant people who were coming into Zambia, not people who were leaving, fleeing as refugees to go to the West…”
“I think there was an impulse in me to write women as central to the text. Part of that is my own limitations as a writer: being able to delineate the varieties of female experience is clearly easier for someone who’s lived as a woman, and projecting myself into male characters is harder for me. It’s something I have to really work on…”
“Old like her father was old, a shaggy shambling old, an old where you'd lost the order of things and felt so sad that you simply had to embrace the loss, reassuring yourself with the lie that you hadn't really wanted all that order to begin with.”
“They were not kings. The empire was a frikkin sham. They were colonialists, and for that you only need brute force – nothing to boast of when you have it. Power’s just an accident that depends on the weakness of others.”