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Zulfiqar, Chaudhry Sadia. "African women writers and the politics of gender." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2014. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5202/.
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This thesis examines the work of a group of African women writers who have emerged over the last forty years. While figures such as Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri and Wole Soyinka are likely to be the chief focus of discussions of African writing, female authors have been at the forefront of fictional interrogations of identity formation and history. In the work of authors such as Mariama Bâ (Senegal), Buchi Emecheta (Nigeria), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria), Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe), and Leila Aboulela (Sudan), there is a clear attempt to subvert the tradition of male writing where the female characters are often relegated to the margins of the culture, and confined to the domestic, private sphere. This body of work has already generated a significant number of critical responses, including readings that draw on gender politics and colonialism; but it is still very much a minor literature, and most mainstream western feminism has not sufficiently processed it. The purpose of this thesis is threefold. First, it draws together some of the most important and influential African women writers of the post-war period and looks at their work, separately and together, in terms of a series of themes and issues, including marriage, family, polygamy, religion, childhood, and education. Second, it demonstrates how African literature produced by women writers is explicitly and polemically engaged with urgent political issues that have both local and global resonance: the veil, Islamophobia and a distinctively African brand of feminist critique. Third, it revisits Fredric Jameson’s claim that all third-world texts are ‘national allegories’ and considers these novels by African women in relation to Jameson’s claim, arguing that their work has complicated Jameson’s assumptions.
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Ivey, Adriane Louise. "Rewriting Christianity : African American women writers and the Bible /." view abstract or download file of text, 2000. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p9987234.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2000.Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 211-216). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.
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Schindler, Melissa Elisabeth. "black women writers and the spatial limits of the African diaspora." Thesis, State University of New York at Buffalo, 2016. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10163890.
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My dissertation contends that diaspora, perhaps the most visible spatial paradigm for theorizing black constructions of identity and self, is inherently limited by the historical conditions of its rise as well as the preoccupations with which it has been most closely associated. I propose that we expand our theoretico-spatio terms for constructions of blackness to include the space of the home, the space of the plantation and the space of the prison (what I call the space of justice). These three spaces point to literary themes, characters, and beliefs that the space of diaspora alone does not explain. Each chapter analyzes the work of three or four writers from the United States, Brazil and Mozambique. These writers include: Paulina Chiziane, Conceição Evaristo, Octavia E. Butler, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Carolina Maria de Jesus, Bernice McFadden, Wanda Coleman, Ifa Bayeza and Asha Bandele.
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Mulala, Beatrice M. "African women writers and the struggle for emancipation : image and reality /." The Ohio State University, 1999. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1488190109868517.
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Adams, Brenda Byrne. "Patterns of healing and wholeness in characterizations of women by selected black women writers." Virtual Press, 1989. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/720157.
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Some Black women writers--Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Cade Bambara, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, and Alice Walker--of American fiction have written characterizations of winning women. Their characterizations include women who are capable of taking risks, making choices, and taking responsiblity for their choices. These winning women are capable of accepting their own successes and failures by the conclusions of the novels. They are characterized as dealing with devastating and traumatic personal histories in a growth-enhancing manner. Characterizations of winning women by these authors are consistently revealed through five developmental stages: conditioning, awareness, interiorizing, reintegrating, and winning. These stages contain patterns that are consistent from author to author.While conditioning and awareness of the negative influcences of conditioning are predictable, this study introduces the concept of interiorizing and reintegrating as positive steps toward becoming a winning woman. Frequent descriptions of numbness and disorientation mark the most obvious stages of interiorizing. It is not until the Twentieth Century that we see women writers using this interiorizing process as a necessary step toward growth. Surviving interiorizing, as these winning women do, leads to the essential stage of reintegrating.Interiorizing is a complete separation from social interaction; reintegrating is a gradual reattachment to social process. First, elaborate descriptions of bathing rituals affirm the importance of a woman's body to herself. Second, reintegrating involves food rituals which signal social reconnection. Celebration banquets and family recipes offer an important reminder to the winning woman that the future is built on the past. Taking the best of what has been learned from the past into the future provides strength and stability.The characterization of a winning woman stops with potential rather than completion. A winning woman must still take risks, make choices, and bear the consequences of her choices. The winning woman does not accept a diminished life of harmful conformity. She is characterized as discovering how to use choice and power. Novels included in this study are: Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Are Watching God; Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters; Paule Marshall's Brownstone, Brown Girl; The Chosen Place, the Timeless People; and Praisesong for the Widow; Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, Linden Hills; and Alice Walker's Meridian, and The Color Purple.Department of English
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Bristol, Brenda Melanie. "The African-diasporic metaphysical female figure in the works of African-diasporic and Creole women writers." Thesis, SOAS, University of London, 2006. http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/28818/.
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Arguments negating the role of the African-diasporic female metaphysical figure in the oral literature of the English-speaking Caribbean and America, hinge on the belief that these supernatural figures represent evil and that such representations disempower women. This thesis offers an alternative comparative analysis of two female metaphysical figures from the Caribbean, as well as two related supernatural figures from America. It explores the central role that the figures played in the formation of New World female subjectivity in slave societies and in the writing of contemporary African-diasporic and white Creole women writers. It focuses specifically on works by Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Jean Rhys, Paule Marshall and Jamaica Kincaid. This thesis is based on two premises; that the metaphysical figures are deitic in origin, therefore non-felicitous, non-essentialist and centrally ambivalent; and that the modernist, postmodernist and magic realist women writers under study, use the figures' non-totalising narratives to write back to the colonial Manichean allegory and to excavate closed periods of New World female history. After an investigation into the West African deitic progenitors of the female oral literary figures, this thesis investigates the representations of such figures in the early works of African-diasporic women writers. It then traces the sociopolitical reasons behind the figures' revision in the two regions under study. It explores the re-interpretations female writers from America and the Caribbean, award the figures, due to the formers' different historical, racial, and socio-political standpoints. Finally, this thesis proposes a framework for the analysis of African-diasporic and Creole women writers' work, based on the operations and interventions of the oral literary African-diasporic female metaphysical figure.
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Longust, Bridgett Renee 1964. "Reconstructing urban space: Twentieth-century women writers of French expression." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/282108.
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This dissertation examines the importance of urban space in the works of feminist writers from France, Quebec, the Maghreb and Francophone West Africa. Each author writes women as subjects of their own experience in the city, identifies the representations of power and gender in urban landscapes, restores a feminist voice to the polis and supports women's claim to enfranchisement in urban space. My analysis is based upon the fundamental premise that urban space reflects power dynamics and is, like gender, a social and political construction borne of a dominant patriarchal ideology. The urban type of the female flaneuse, or ambulant heroine, is prevalent in several of the texts. These are women whose personal trajectories through the metropolis serve as a common referant to define their identity. Exploitation, disciplinary surveillance and disillusion characterize (1) Claire Etcherelli's urban dystopia in Elise ou la vraie vie. (2) Annie Ernaux's observations of life in the periphery of Paris in the Journal du dehors are centered on the market economy of the city and women's status as commodity. The deviant behavior of (3) Andree Chedid's virtually homeless, elderly heroine in La cite fertile thinly veils a provocative inquiry into the notion of urban identity. (4) Christine de Pizan and the Quebecoise writer, (5) Nicole Brossard both employ the metaphor of construction--architectural and textual--and share utopian visions of women's writing as the site for feminist praxis and cultural transformation. (6) Nina Bouraoui's cloistered Algerian heroine in La Voyeuse interdite and the women in (7) Assia Djebar's novels dare to defy and transgress the boundaries which exclude women from the urban realm in the Maghreb. (8) Calixthe Beyala's novels depict young African women struggling with issues of identity and survival in metropolises dominated by a repressive, patriarchal mentality. Throughout the texts, the city appears in multiple guises: as a text, a body, a marketplace, and a prison. For these authors, writing on the city constitutes a feminist act asserting women's right to claim a voice in that space. These works situate the city as a locus of cultural and political critique, whose spatial configurations reflect the social constructions of gender.
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Sobott-Mogwe, Gaele. "Wozanazo : a bio-bibliographical survey of twentieth-century Black South African women writers." Thesis, University of Hull, 1996. http://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources/hull:8402.
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The canon of South African literature, as shaped by publishers, academics and past government education policies, reflects dominant race, class, language and gender biases. Knowledge of large areas of South African literature is still limited by such biases. This research focuses on and seeks to redress some of the silences surrounding Black South African Women writers and their texts. Working within the bounds of a literary canon defined by an established hierarchy and a system of binary opposites, the research deals with denied existence using the terms 'Black', 'South African' and 'Women' as tactical tools to rewrite history and repossess, revalue and reposition identity and knowledge. These terms are not intended to act as indicators of static or essential being and are used provisionally. It is hoped that the research will provide the means for new and continued interrogation of meaning within and beyond the labels and categories I have used. Prompted by an obvious lack of secondary reference material on Black South African Women writers, the research was developed as a reference source. It takes the form of a biobibliographical survey of Black South African Women writers from the first 'known' published Woman writer to the present day. The survey includes texts written in African languages as a conscious attempt to overcome the inequalities and silences promoted through the priority given to English-language texts within the South African literary canon. While Black South African Women's writing does not have a tradition in the canonical sense, the survey illustrates that it does have a past, a present and a future. It is guided by a notion of recovery and an attempt to begin a process of preservation that will hopefully continue and expand. The research aims to encourage a return to the original texts which would not otherwise be 'known'. It is thereby hoped that it will foster a greater critical awareness of Black South African Women's writing. The emphasis on both auto/biographical and bibliographical data is considered important In enabling the development of a better understanding of the way in which Black South African Women writers and their writing emerge from and intervene in specific and diverse contexts, public and private. The greater aim of the research is to provide a resource which will help us explore and begin to theorise that which resists, decentres, transforms and operates beyond the limitations set by established hierarchical polarities.
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Steenkamp, Lize-Maree. "Place, space and patriarchal femininities in selected contemporary novels by African women writers." University of the Western Cape, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/11394/6639.
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Philosophiae Doctor - PhDIn much feminist literature, women’s spaces are analysed as constructive and supportive sites that may offer respite from patriarchy. However, women’s spaces are not inherently emancipatory. Through the socio-spatial dispersal of patriarchal power, places and spaces varying in scale – nations, cities, rural towns, private-public places and the home – can construct women who further the interests of men. Specifically, homosocial spaces, spaces where women interact with other women, can produce femininities that oppress other women by actively advancing patriarchal concerns. The selected primary texts consider spaces in regionally diverse but socially similar African contexts: Sefi Atta’s Swallow (2011) and Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives (2010) are set in Nigeria, Miral al-Tahawy’s The Tent (1998) is set in Egypt, while Leila Aboulela’s Lyrics Alley (2010) is set in both Egypt and Sudan. I use the selected novels as cartographies for socio-geographical inquiry to establish how space and place construct patriarchal women. Literary spaces and places are studied from largest to smallest scale: The analysis of national spaces in the novels is followed by a study of urban and rural spaces, followed by private-public places, domestic place and, finally, at a micro-scale, the body-as-place. The analyses of these literary spaces will reveal the mechanisms by which patriarchal women are spatially produced, and may use space to oppress other women.
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Moïse, Myriam. "African Caribbean Women Writers in Canada and the USA : can the Diaspora Speak?" Thesis, Paris 3, 2013. http://www.theses.fr/2013PA030086.
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Cette thèse étudie les spécificités du discours produit par les femmes écrivains de la diaspora afro-caribéenne au Canada et aux Etats-Unis, notamment chez Edwidge Danticat, Nalo Hopkinson, Jamaica Kincaid, Paule Marshall, M. NourbeSe Philip, et Olive Senior. La position ambivalente de ces auteures qui sont culturellement dedans et dehors influence leurs écrits, en prose comme en poésie, dans lesquels elles revendiquent leurs histoires, leurs corps et leurs langues. La discussion s’attache à observer les opérations discursives en démontrant que les auteures étudiées articulent de nouvelles formes de subjectivité et prouvent que la formation des identités culturelles ne dépend pas d’un territoire stable, mais plutôt d’un espace culturel mobile, voire volatile. D’une part, ces femmes réécrivent le passé dans un discours qui déstabilise les versions hégémoniques de l’histoire et d’autre part, elles cherchent à représenter leurs corps en dépassant leur dimension matérielle et choisissent d’embrasser leur schizophrénie culturelle. Leurs projets brisent le silence et libèrent les subjectivités incontrôlées à travers la création de polyphonies incarnées, de multiples contre discours et d’énoncés non-conformistes. Les constructions discursives de leur moi ne pouvant en effet se manifester qu’à l’extérieur des terminologies canoniques, ces auteures s’inscrivent dans une démarche de résistance au discours unique et privilégient a fortiori une rhétorique hétéroglossique. En somme, cette analyse comparative est innovante en ce qu’elle démontre que mémoires, langues et identités diasporiques sont intimement liées, et qu’au delà de leurs démarches respectives et des stratégies discursives qui leur sont propres, ces auteures sont des écrivains du limbo qui, à la manière des danseurs de limbo, transforment l’instabilité en une expérience de recréation artistique. Elles placent leurs représentations au coeur d’une dynamique empreinte de mouvement, de fluidité, de pluralité et d’hybridité, et prouvent clairement que la diaspora féminine caribéenne peut faire entendre sa voixThis dissertation examines the specific discourse produced by diasporic African Caribbean women writers in Canada and the USA, namely Edwidge Danticat, Nalo Hopkinson, Jamaica Kincaid, Paule Marshall, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Olive Senior. These authors’ ambivalent positions as both cultural insiders and outsiders are conveyed through their prose and poetry, in which they reclaim their histories, bodies and tongues. The thesis highlights discourse operations in demonstrating that the selected authors articulate new forms of subjectivity, hence proving that cultural identities do not depend on static territories but rather on mobile and even volatile cultural spaces. Besides reconstructing the past through a discourse that truly unsettles hegemonic versions of history, African Caribbean diasporic women writers represent their bodies beyond materiality and choose to embrace their cultural schizophrenia. Their projects consist in un-silencing the unruly selves through the creation of embodied polyphonies, multiple counter-voices and anti-conformist utterances. The discursive constructions of the self therefore occur outside of canonical terminology, as these women writers resist single-voiced discourse and favour heteroglossic rhetorics. Ultimately, this comparative literary analysis is innovative as it proves that diasporic memories, tongues and identities are interlinked, and that beyond their respective agendas and personal discursive strategies, these authors are limbo writers who, like limbo dancers, transform instability into a recreative and artistic experience. They inscribe their self-representations into a powerful dialectic of movement, fluidity, plurality and hybridity, and truly demonstrate that the feminine Caribbean diaspora can speak
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Milatovic, Maja. "Reclaimed genealogies : reconsidering the ancestor figure in African American women writers' neo-slave narratives." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/10656.
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This thesis examines the ancestor figure in African American women writers’ neoslave narratives. Drawing on black feminist, critical race and whiteness studies and trauma theory, the thesis closely reads neo-slave narratives by Margaret Walker, Octavia Butler, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison and Phyllis Alesia Perry. The thesis aims to reconsider the ancestor figure by extending the definition of the ancestor as predecessor to include additional figurative and literal means used to invoke the ancestral past of enslavement. The thesis argues that the diverse ancestral figures in these novels demonstrate the prevailing effects of slavery on contemporary subjects, attest to the difficulties of historicising past oppressions and challenge post-racial discourses. Chapter 1 analyses Margaret Walker’s historical novel Jubilee (1966), identifying it as an important prerequisite for subsequent neo-slave narratives. The chapter aims to offer a new reading of the novel by situating it within a black feminist ideological framework. Taking into account the novel’s social and political context, the chapter suggests that the ancestral figures or elderly members of the slave community function as means of resistance, access to personal and collective history and contribute to the self-constitution of the protagonist. The chapter concludes by suggesting that Walker’s novel fulfils a politically engaged function of inscribing the black female subject into discussions on the legacy of slavery and drawing attention to the particularity of black women’s experiences. Chapter 2 examines Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1978), featuring a contemporary black woman’s return to the antebellum past and her discovery of a white slaveholding ancestor. The chapter introduces the term “displacement” to explore the transformative effects of shifting positionalities and destabilisation of contemporary frames of reference. The chapter suggests that the novel challenges idealised portrayals of a slave community and expresses scepticism regarding its own premise of fictionally reimagining slavery. With its inconclusive ending, Kindred ultimately illustrates how whiteness and dominant versions of history prevail in the seemingly progressive present. Chapter 3 discusses Gayl Jones’ Corregidora (1975) and its subversion of the matrilineal model of tradition by reading the maternal ancestor’s narrative as oppressive, limiting and psychologically burdening. The chapter introduces the term “ancestral subtext” in order to identify the ways in which ancestral narratives of enslavement serve as subtexts to the descendants’ lives and constrict their subjectivities. The chapter argues that the ancestral subtexts frame contemporary practices, inform the notion of selfhood and attest to the reproduction of past violence in the present. Chapter 4 deals with Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata (1998) exploring complex ancestral figures as survivors of the Middle Passage and their connection to Africa as an affective site of identity reclamation. The chapter identifies the role the quilt, the skill of quilting and their metaphorical potential as symbolic means of communicating ancestral trauma and conveying multivoiced “ancestral articulations”. The chapter suggests that the project of healing and recovering the self in relation to ancestral enslavement are premised on re-connecting with African cultural contexts and an intergenerational exchange of the culturally specific skill of quilting.
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Chabwera, Elinettie Kwanjana. "Writing black womanhood : feminist writing by four contemporary African and black diaspora women writers." Thesis, University of Leeds, 2004. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/7186/.
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This thesis explores the concept of black womanhood and female identity in Africa and its diaspora. It examines questions of black womanhood in relation to cultural concepts of black women. It analyses the ways black women perceive and represent themselves and how they articulate their self-perceptions within and outside the traditional cultures of their societies. The problems of black women foregrounded in most postcolonial black women's texts reflect their marginal and oppressed position. The study will explore the textual voice, social and political agency, and how black women's experiences and histories are articulated in the writing of four contemporary black women writers from Africa and the Caribbean. Contesting and reacting against distorted and marginalizing constructions in black men's texts, Bessie Head, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ema Brodber and Olive Senior portray a black womanhood which challenges black women's marginality in literature and in society. I suggest that the writers' concerns, focus and narrative strategies contribute to an understanding of the ways in which black women perceive themselves. The four writers create a variety of characters who illustrate individual as well as communal gender and class-specific conflicts produced by their socio-historical realities. The writers’ perceptions and sensibilities as women are informed by their different backgrounds and relationships to their societies. Their narrative points of view which are grounded in history and which involve use of the oral storytelling techniques of their societies reflect the diversity and complexity of black women's lives and experiences.
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Spencer, Lynda Gichanda. "Writing women in Uganda and South Africa : emerging writers from post-repressive regimes." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/86251.
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Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2014.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The thesis examines how women writers from Uganda and South Africa simultaneously offer a critique of nationalist narratives and articulate a gendered nationalism. My focus will be on the new imaginings of women in and of the nation that are being produced through the narratives of emerging women writers in post-repressive nation-states. I explore the linkages in post-conflict writing by focusing on the literary representations of women and womanhood, while taking into account some of the differences in how these writers write women in these two post-repressive regimes. I read the narratives from these two countries together because, in the last fifty years, both Uganda and South Africa have been through prolonged periods of political repression and instability followed by negotiated transitions to new political dispensations. I use the phrase post-repressive to refer to the post-civil war era after 1986 in Uganda and the post-apartheid period subsequent to the 1994 first democratic elections in South Africa. From the late 1990s, there has been a steady increase in fiction written by emerging women writers in Uganda and South Africa. The term emerging women writers in the Ugandan literary context refers to the writers who have benefitted from the emergence of FEMRITE Publications, the publishing house of the Ugandan Women Writers’ Association; in the South African setting, I use the term to define black women writers publishing for the first time in a liberated state. The current political climate in both countries has inaugurated a new era for women writers; cracks are widening for these new voices, creating more spaces that allow them to foreground, interrogate, engage and address wide-ranging topics which lacked more forms of expression in the past. This study explores how women writers from Uganda and South Africa attempt to capture women’s experiences in literary texts and seeks to find ways of interpreting how such constructs of female identity in the aftermath of different forms of oppression articulate various signs of rupture and continuation with earlier representations of female experience in these two nation states. There are three core chapters in this thesis. I approach the gendered experience as represented in the fictional narratives of emerging women writers through three different perspectives; namely, war and the aftermath, popular literary genres, and identity markers. In the process, I try to think through the following questions: How are writers reclaiming and re-evaluating women’s participation during the oppressive regimes of civil war in Uganda and apartheid in South Africa? How are women writers rethinking and repositioning the roles of women as they continue to live in patriarchal societies that marginalize and oppress them? To what extent have things changed for women in the aftermath of these oppressive regimes as represented in the texts? What new representations of women are emerging? For whom, and from what positions, are these women writing? Is literary representation a reiteration of political representation that ends up not being effective? What is the relation between literary and political representation? Do these narratives open up alternative avenues for writers to represent women’s interests? How do new female literary representations emerge in different novels such as chick lit and crime fiction?
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie proefskrif ondersoek die wyses waarop vroueskrywers uit Uganda en Suid-Afrika krities kyk na nasionalisitiese narratiewe en tegelyk ook na ‘n gendered nasionalisme. Daar word gefokus op die nuwe uitbeeldinge van vroue in en van die nasies wat spruit uit die narratiewe van opkomende vroueskrywers in nasiestate in die post-onderdrukking-tydperk. Deur te fokus op die uitbeeldinge van vroue en vroulikheid word die verbande tussen post-konflik-skryfwerk ondersoek, en word ook rekening gehou met etlike verskille in die wyses waarop vroue deur sodanige skrywers in spesifieke post-onderdrukking-regimes uitgebeeld word. Die narratiewe uit die twee lande word saam gelees, want in die loop van die afgelope vyftig jaar ondervind sowel Uganda as Suid-Afrika langdurige politieke onderdrukking en onbestendigheid, gevolg deur onderhandelde oorgange na nuwe politieke bedelings. Die term post-onderdrukking verwys na die tydperk na 1986 na die burgeroorlog in Uganda en na die post-apartheid-era na afloop van die eerste demokratiese verkiesing in Suid-Afrika in 1994. Sedert die laat-1990’s was daar ‘n geleidelike toename in fiksie deur opkomende vroueskrywers in Uganda en Suid-Afrika. In die Ugandese letterkundige konteks verwys die term opkomende vroueskrywers na skrywers wat gebaat het by die totstandkoming van FEMRITE Publications, die uitgewery van die Ugandese vroueskrywersvereniging; in die Suid-Afrikaanse opset word die term gebruik om swart vroueskrywers te beskryf wat vir die eerste keer in ‘n bevryde land kon publiseer. Die huidige politieke klimaat in albei lande het vir vroueskrywers ‘n nuwe era ingelei; vir sulke vars stemme gaan daar breër barste oop wat hulle toelaat om al hoe meer ruimte te skep waarin wyduiteenlopende onderwerpe, wat in die verlede minder uitdrukkingsgeleenthede geniet het, vooropgestel, ondersoek, betrek en aangespreek kan word. Die proefskrif ondersoek die maniere waarop vroueskrywers uit Uganda en Suid-Afrika die vroulike ervaring in letterkundige geskrifte uitbeeld. Daar word gepoog om te vertolk hoe sodanige konstrukte vroulike identiteit verwoord in die nadraai van verskeie soorte onderdrukking en uiting gee aan verskillende tekens van beide die onderbreking in en die voortsetting van vroeëre uitbeeldinge van die vroulike ervaring in die twee nasiestate. Die proefskrif bevat drie kernhoofstukke. Die gendered ervaring word uit drie afsonderlike hoeke benader soos dit in die narratiewe verteenwoordig word, naamlik: oorlog en die nadraai daarvan; populêre letterkundige genres; en identiteitskenmerke. In die loop daarvan word getrag om die volgende vrae te deurdink: Hoe word vroue se deelname tydens die onderdrukkende regimes van die burgeroorlog in Uganda en apartheid in Suid-Afrika hereien en herwaardeer? Hoe herdink en herposisioneer vroueskrywers tans die rolle van vroue soos hulle steeds in patriargale samelewings voortleef waar hulle opsygeskuif en onderdruk word? In hoe ‘n mate het sake vir vroue verander in die nadraai van die onderdrukking, soos dit in die tekste uitgebeeld word? Watter vars representasies van vroue kom onder die nuwe bedeling tot stand? Vir wie, en uit watter posisies, skryf hierdie vroue tans? Is die letterkundige representasie bloot ‘n herhaling van die politieke representasie, wat dan op niks doeltreffends uitloop nie? Wat is die verhouding tussen politieke en letterkundige representasie? Baan hierdie narratiewe alternatiewe weë oop waar skrywers die belange van vroue kan verteenwoordig? Hoe kom nuwe vroulike letterkundige representasies in verskillende narratiewe vorms soos chick lit en misdaadfiksie voor?
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Mpoke-Bigg, Amba. "Leadership, Voice, and Visibility Strengthening African women’s voice and representation: A case study of the African Women Development Fund’s social justice writing workshop for women writers." Thesis, Malmö universitet, Fakulteten för kultur och samhälle (KS), 2020. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-21974.
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Despite recent gains in areas such as school attendance and literacy, the struggle for women’s rights and equality in Africa remains constant. Alongside the socio-economic barriers holding down millions of women, is the fight against the gender bias and stereotyping which puts women in the backseat of decision-making, policy-driving, or leadership roles.This dissertation project is a case study of a women’s social justice writing workshop run by the African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF), a Pan-African grant-making organisation. Convened three times since 2014, it brings together women from across the continent for a residential camp to sharpen participants’ skills in writing and communicating about social justice issues.This research project attempts to examine the workshop in the context of media for development theory and strategies, which see the media (print, electronic and new media) as the fundamental strategies that drive the process of communicating. (Manyozo). It also looks at its relevance in the context of gender inequalities in media representation in Africa in line with Beijing 1995’s global call.Although to a very limited scale, the study suggests that the workshop has played a small, yet significant role in conceptualising and implementation of a communication for development strategy that emphasizes capacity-building.Harnessing the power of storytelling, the five years since the workshop, has seen many of the African women who participated, produce local content, confidently representing and analysing “our own issues for ourselves in our diversities.” Through their writings, radio shows, news stories, blogs and public speaking engagements, they are joining powerful agents of change in bringing transformation to the struggle to combat gender stereotypes and inequality, which is still far from over.
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Rountree, Wendy Alexia. "THE CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN-AMERICAN FEMALE BILDUNGSROMAN." University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2001. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin997212820.
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Evans, Josephine B. A. "A woman's place is in the struggle? : South African women writers and the politics of gender." Thesis, University of York, 1994. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.261085.
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Strongson, Julie. "(Re)constructing a homeland reflective nostalgia in the works of contemporary Francophone North African Jewish women writers /." College Park, Md. : University of Maryland, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/1903/6775.
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Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Maryland, College Park, 2007.Thesis research directed by: Comparative Literature. Title from t.p. of PDF. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in paper. Published by UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, Mich.
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Bradbury, Janine. ""You should've seen my Grandmother - she passed for white" : African American women writers, genealogy, and the passing genre." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 2015. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/10461/.
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This thesis critiques the prevailing assumption that passing is passé in contemporary African American women’s literature. By re-examining the work of Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Dorothy West, Alice Walker, and Barbara Neely, I argue that these writers signify on canonical passing narratives – Brown’s Clotel (1853) and Clotelle (1867), Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1900), Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912), Larsen’s Passing (1929), and Hurst’s Imitation of Life (1933) – in order to confront and redress both the historical roots and contemporary contexts of colourism. As well bridging this historiographic gap, I make a case for reading passing as a multivalent trope that facilitates this very process of cultural interrogation. Rather than focussing on literal episodes of passing, I consider moments of symbolic, textual, and narrative passing, as well as the genealogical and intertextual processes at play in each text which account for the spectral hauntings of the passing-for-white figure in post-civil rights literature. In Chapter 1, I examine the relationship between passing and embodiments of beauty in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), Bambara’s “Christmas Eve at Johnson’s Drugs N Goods” (1974) and Neely’s Blanche Among the Talented Tenth (1994). In Chapter 2, I discuss passing, class, and capital in Naylor’s Linden Hills (1985) and Dorothy West’s The Wedding (1995). In Chapter 3, I suggest that Walker and Morrison revisit Larsen’s Passing in their short stories “Source” (1982) and “Recitatif” (1983). Finally, I conclude this project with a discussion of Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child (2015) in order to demonstrate the continued centrality of the passing trope for authors interested in colourism, genealogy, and black women’s experiences.
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Mitchell, Shawn E. "Instinctive presence: an examination of the maternal discourse in selected works by African American and Native American women writers." DigitalCommons@Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center, 1999. http://digitalcommons.auctr.edu/dissertations/3521.
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The purpose of this study was to examine the underlying maternal motifs in selected works by African American and Native American women writers. The study, specifically focused upon African American author Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Native American author Ella Cara Deloria’s Waterlilv. These respective African American and Native American women, through their unwavering positions on maternal supremacy, have rightfully positioned the mother figure, whether biological, cosmic or surrogate, to the forefront. Within this formation, the bearer of life is revealed and revered as the authoritative source of spiritual growth, generational sustenance, and ancestral tribute. Both authors emphasize the significance of the maternal figure through the use of revision and (re)memory, important literary devices reflective of both cultures, to illustrate the simultaneous past, present and future. The research confirmed that the selected African American and Native American women writers strategically devised their literary language to demonstrate the prominence of this central maternal figure, and her role as maintainer of cultural traditions, thus the preserver of a society.
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Hunter, Eva Shireen. "A sense of place in selected African works by Doris Lessing read in conjunction with novels of education by contemporary white South African women writers." Doctoral thesis, University of Cape Town, 1990. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/8369.
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Bibliography: leaves 211-217.This study provides a more intensive reading of certain works by Doris Lessing set in Southern Africa than has yet been attempted, and reads them,• for the first time, in conjunction with a particular literary lineage within Southern African letters, the novel of education by white women. The works by Lessing chosen for discussion are: two short stories, "The Old Chief Mshlanga" (1951) and "Sunrise on the Veld" (1951), the first two volumes of the Children of Violence series, Martha Quest (1952) and A Proper Marriage (1954), and Lessing's autobiographical account of a return visit to Rhodesia in 1956, Going Home (1957). Those by the other Southern African women writers--all of which, with the exception of Gordimer's The Lying Days have received virtually no critical attention to date--are: Nadine Gordimer's The Lying Days (1953)', Jillian Becker's The Virgins• (1976), Carolyn Slaughter's Dreams of the Kalahari (1981), Lynn Freed's Home Ground (1986), E.M. / MacPhail's Phoebe and Nio (1987), and Menan du Plessis's A State of Fear (1983).
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Eaton, Kalenda C. "Talkin' bout a revolution Afro-politico womanism and the ideological transformation of the black community, 1965-1980 /." Connect to this title online, 2004. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1093540674.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2004.Document formatted into pages; contains 185 p. Includes bibliographical references. Abstract available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center; full text release delayed at author's request until 2007 Aug. 26.
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Kempen, Laura Charlotte. "Words of deliverance : the (re)constitution of the disenfranchised feminine subject in selected works of West African and Latin American women writers /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/6694.
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Lambert, Jade Maia. "Ama Ata Aidoo’s Anowa: Performative Practice and the Postcolonial Subject." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2005. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1133810135.
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Wiggins, Rebecca Wiltberger. "MEETING AT THE THRESHOLD: SLAVERY’S INFLUENCE ON HOSPITALITY AND BLACK PERSONHOOD IN LATE-ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN LITERATURE." UKnowledge, 2018. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/83.
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In my dissertation, I argue that both white and black authors of the late-1850s and early-1860s used scenes of race-centered hospitality in their narratives to combat the pervasive stereotypes of black inferiority that flourished under the influence of chattel slavery. The wide-spread scenes of hospitality in antebellum literature—including shared meals, entertaining overnight guests, and business meetings in personal homes—are too inextricably bound to contemporary discussions of blackness and whiteness to be ignored. In arguing for the humanizing effects of playing host or guest as a black person, my project joins the work of literary scholars from William L. Andrews to Keith Michael Green who argue for broader and more complex approaches to writers’ strategies for recognizing the full personhood of African Americans in the mid-nineteenth century.
In the last fifteen to twenty years, hospitality theory has reshaped social science research, particularly around issues of race, immigration, and citizenship. In literary studies, scholars are only now beginning to mine the ways that theorists from diverse backgrounds—including continental philosophers such as Derrida and Levinas, womanist philosopher and theologian N. Lynne Westerfield, and post-colonial writers and scholars such as Tahar Ben Jelloun—can expand the reading of nineteenth century literature by examining the discourse and practice of hospitality. When host and guest meet at the threshold they must acknowledge the full personhood of the other; the relationship of hospitality is dependent on beginning in a state of equilibrium grounded in mutual respect. In this project I argue that because of the acknowledgement of mutual humanness required in acts of hospitality, hospitality functions as a humanizing narrative across the spectrum of antebellum black experience: slave and free, male and female, uneducated and highly educated.
In chapter one, “Unmasking Southern Hospitality: Discursive Passing in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred,” I examine Stowe’s use of a black fugitive slave host who behaves like a southern gentleman to undermine the ethos of southern honor culture and to disrupt the ideology that supports chattel slavery. In chapter two, “Transformative Hospitality and Interracial Education in Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends,” I examine how the race-centered scenes of hospitality in Frank J. Webb’s 1857 novel The Garies and Their Friends creates educational opportunities where northern racist ideology can be uncovered and rejected by white men and women living close to, but still outside, the free black community of Philadelphia. In the final chapter, “Slavery’s Subversion of Hospitality in Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” I examine how Linda Brent’s engagement in acts of hospitality (both as guest and host) bring to light the warping influence of chattel slavery on hospitality in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
In conclusion, my project reframes the practices of antebellum hospitality as yet another form of nonviolent everyday resistance to racist ideology rampant in both the North and the South. This project furthers the ways that American literature scholars understand active resistance to racial oppression in the nineteenth century, putting hospitality on an equal footing with other subversive practices, such as learning to read or racial passing.
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Huguley, Piper Gian. "Why Tell the Truth When a Lie Will Do?: Re-Creations and Resistance in the Self-Authored Life Writing of Five American Women Fiction Writers." unrestricted, 2006. http://etd.gsu.edu/theses/available/etd-04252006-174728/.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Georgia State University, 2006.Title from title screen. Audrey Goodman, committee chair; Thomas L. McHaney, Elizabeth West, committee members. Electronic text (253 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed May15, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (243-253).
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Birge, Amy Anastasia. ""Mislike Me not for My Complexion": Shakespearean Intertextuality in the Works of Nineteenth-Century African-American Women." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1996. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278175/.
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Caliban, the ultimate figure of linguistic and racial indeterminacy in The Tempest, became for African-American writers a symbol of colonial fears of rebellion against oppression and southern fears of black male sexual aggression. My dissertation thus explores what I call the "Calibanic Quadrangle" in essays and novels by Anna Julia Cooper, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. The figure of Caliban allows these authors to inflect the sentimental structure of the novel, to elevate Calibanic utterance to what Cooper calls "crude grandeur and exalted poesy," and to reveal the undercurrent of anxiety in nineteenth-century American attempts to draw rigid racial boundaries. The Calibanic Quadrangle enables this thorough critique because it allows the black woman writer to depict the oppression of the "Other," southern fears of black sexuality, the division between early black and white women's issues, and the enduring innocence of the progressive, educated, black female hero ~ all within the legitimized boundaries of the Shakespearean text, which provides literary authority to the minority writer. I call the resulting Shakespearean intertextuality a Quadrangle because in each of these African-American works a Caliban figure, a black man or "tragic mulatto" who was once "petted" and educated, struggles within a hostile environment of slavery and racism ruled by the Prospero figure, the wielder of "white magic," who controls reproduction, fears miscegenation, and enforces racial hierarchy. The Miranda figure, associated with the womb and threatened by the specter of miscegenation, advocates slavery and perpetuates the hostile structure. The Ariel figure, graceful and ephemeral, usually the "tragic mulatta" and a slave, desires her freedom and complements the Caliban figure. Each novel signals the presence of the paradigm by naming at least one character from The Tempest (Caliban in Cooper's A Voice from the South; "Mirandy" in Harper's Iola Leroy; Prospero in Hopkins's Contending Forces; and Ariel in Hopkins's Hagar's Daughter).
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Lambert, Jade Maia. "Ama Ata Aidoo's Anowa performative practice and the postcolonial subject /." Connect to this document online, 2005. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=miami1133810135.
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Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of Theatre, 2005.Title from first page of PDF document. Document formatted into pages; contains [1], iv, 57 p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 56-57).
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Hill, Chyna Y. "A Rainbow in the Clouds: Planting Spiritual Reconciliation in Mama’s Southern Garden." DigitalCommons@Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center, 2016. http://digitalcommons.auctr.edu/cauetds/48.
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Through a content analysis of the maternal relationships in Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers Gardens, the author evaluates how southern black women writers construct black motherhood. This study is based on the premise that Eurocentric paradigms of motherhood confine black mothers to controlling images that continue to criminalize, distort, and devalue black motherhood. The researcher finds that the institution of black motherhood exists independently of Eurocentric paradigms. The conclusions drawn from these findings suggest that black women writers construct motherhood in terms of Womanist leadership. In the aforementioned memoirs, Womanist leadership is learned and defined in the black church. In summation, this thesis finds that southern black women writers use spiritual reconciliation as a form of Womanist leadership.
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Pfeffer, Miki. "Exhibiting Women: Sectional Confrontation and Reconciliation in the Woman's Department at the World's Exposition, New Orleans, 1884-85." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2006. http://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/339.
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At the World's Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, the Woman's Department offered women of all regions of the country an opportunity to exhibit what they considered "woman's work." As women came together and attempted sectional reconciliation, controversy persisted, especially over the selection of northern suffragist Julia Ward Howe, author of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," as the Department's president. However, during the course of the event, which lasted from December 16, 1884 to May 31, 1885, New Orleanians and other southern women learned skills and strategies from participants and famous women visitors, and these southerners insinuated their voices into the national debate on late-nineteenth-century women's issues.
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Nelaupe, Emmanuelle. "Transition politique et production romanesque : l'écriture féminine noire en Afrique du Sud de 1998 à 2011." Thesis, La Réunion, 2017. http://www.theses.fr/2017LARE0036/document.
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Le passage de l'Afrique du Sud d'un système politique répressif à un système démocratique a ouvert un nouvel espace de parole aux exclus, notamment aux femmes noires à travers les Commissions pour la Vérité. La parole féminine noire libérée suite à la transition politique du pays se reflète aussi dans le développement d'une production littéraire féminine, donnant lieu à l'émergence de nouvelles formes d'écriture romanesque, étudiées dans ce travail qui porte sur dix romans publiés par huit auteures entre 1998 et 2011 : S. Magona, K.L. Molope, K. Matlwa, A.N. Sithebe, A. Makholwa, H.J. Gololai, Z. Wanner et C. Jele. Nous étudions dans un premier temps comment les écrivaines s'approprient le genre romanesque durant la période transitionnelle, s'éloignant d'une écriture réaliste politiquement engagée, courante durant l'apartheid, pour se tourner vers une écriture de l'intime qui met en lumière les traumatismes d'un passé national qui hante le présent. Puis, nous étudions dans les trois parties suivantes comment les auteures émergeant durant la période post-transitionnelle explorent des genres jusqu’ici peu utilisés par les femmes noires sud-africaines : le Bildungsroman, le roman policier et la chick lit, mettant en mots les peurs et les angoisses de la nouvelle Afrique du Sud. Revisitant des genres européens, pour certains populaires, à travers une perspective féminine noire nouvelle, ces auteures continuent d'innover tant dans les thématiques abordées que dans une écriture fondée sur le mélange. Le roman devient un moyen subversif pour critiquer une société patriarcale fortement occidentalisée, qui ne doit pas renier son passé afin de faire face aux nouveaux défis à venirThe South African political transition from a repressive system to a democratic one opened new spaces to a marginalized part of the population among whom the black woman to express themselves, such as the Truth and Reconciliation hearings. This black feminine voice, made free by the political transition is reflected through the development of a literary female production. It gave way to the emergence of new novelistic forms, analysed in our study through ten novels written by eight different female writers between 1998 and 2011: S. Magona, K.L. Molope, K. Matlwa, A.N. Sithebe, A. Makholwa, H.J. Gololai, Z. Wanner and C. Jele. In a first part, we analyse the way these authors rewrite the novel during the transitional period, moving away from a realistic writing, deeply involved in politics and largely used during the apartheid era, towards a more intimate way of writing which reflect the traumas of a national past haunting the present. Then, we examine in three parts how the writers emerging during the post-transitional period explore new genres, rarely used by black South African women until then, namely the Bildungsroman, detective fiction and chick lit, which reflect their fears in the new South Africa. These authors rewrite these European genres, among which popular ones, through a new feminine perspective, thus innovating the themes they deal with and creating a literature made of mixtures. The European novel becomes a subversive tool to criticise a patriarchal and Europeanised society, which, according to these authors, should not deny the past in order to solve the new challenges coming
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Adler, Michelle. "Skirting the edges of civilisation : British women travellers and travel writers in South Africa, 1797-1899." Thesis, SOAS, University of London, 1996. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.320150.
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Mtuze, Peter Tshobiso. "A feminist critique of the image of woman in the prose works of selected Xhosa writers (1909 - 1980)." Doctoral thesis, University of Cape Town, 1990. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/23636.
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The study examines, from a feminist point of view, the stereotypic image of woman in Xhosa prose fiction from pre-literate times to the era of written literature (1909 - 1980). Attaching feminist critical theory to conventional literary characterisation gives this pioneering study a human dime,n sion that is bound to rejuvenate traditional critical appredation and highlight the tremendous power of art to reflect or parallel real-life experiences. Consequently, the study transcends the confines of traditional literary criticism. It throws interdisciplinary light on the African feminist dilemma over the past 70 years while focusing on gender stereotyping as a characterisation technique. Chapter 1 clearly demarcates the scope of study and the critical position adopted, while chapter 2 traces stereotypes back to Xhosa folk-tales. In this way, an interesting link or parallel in stereotyping between oral and written literature is highlighted. It is worth pointing out that Chapter 3 is significant in that no women writers' works produced in the first and the second decades have survived. The male writers of the period describe women in strict stereotypic fashion, without fear of contradiction, from Woman as Eve to Woman as Witch, among other archetypal images. The female stereotypic image in the third and the fourth decades, the role of the first two female novelists and the early seeds of female. resistance to male domination, are discussed. in Chapter 4 while Chapter 5 highlights the depiction of female characters by male and female prose writers in the Fifties, culminating in Mzamane's exposure of glaring anti-female social norms and practices. In Chapter 6 the spotlight is cast on the woman of the Sixties and the rise of active resistance to male dominance. Some contemporary women, as pointed out in Chapter 7, have crossed the Rubicon in diverse ways. They are assertive, independent, proactive and relentlessly opposed to male dominance. Chapter 8 sums up the main points in relation to the Xhosa woman's attitude towards Western feminism: while many Xhosa women feel justifiably unhappy about male dominance, they refuse to let their frustrations affect their unity with men in the greater struggle against racism. Although the study concludes on an anti-climactic note for Western feminists, it focuses on this crucial and unique distinction between Western and black feminism.
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Letcher, Valerie Helen. "Trespassing beyond the borders Harriet Ward as writer and commentator on the Eastern Cape frontier." Thesis, Rhodes University, 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002283.
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The aim of this thesis is to provide an introduction to the work of writer and journalist Harriet Ward, resident in the Eastern Cape from 1842 to 1848. She was a prolific correspondent to various periodicals published both in South Africa and in London. It would be true to say, to judge from the evidence, that she fulfilled a need felt by the British public for information on life and events in South Africa, and that she became the trusted guide of the middle-class reader. Her range covers reports from the frontiers of war, journalistic articles, memoirs, short stories, novels, autobiography, and editions of other writers' work. After the publication of her articles on the Seventh Frontier War (1846-7), she was recognised and respected as a commentator on the situation at the Eastern Cape, an unusual role for a woman at this time. She was also amongst the foremost victorian women writers published from the early eighteen forties until the end of the eighteen-fifties. Harriet Ward has left a vivid historical and sociological account of the Cape frontier, and her observations and judgements provide a hitherto virtually unknown perspective on an important part of South African history and letters. What makes her even more interesting, as this study seeks to show, is that she was far from conventional in her response to her new environment, both as as a woman and as a representative of a colonialist power. The record she has left of her thoughts on the people, landscape and situations of the time has the capacity to surprise the post-colonial literary critic and historian. Her struggle to find a discursive mode in which to express her consciousness of the oppression, patriarchal and colonial, of the marginalised, whether woman, indigene, Afrikaner, or creole, reveals a significantly transgressive or subversive response to the issues of the day. In re-discovering Harriet Ward, we are forced to reassess our assumptions regarding the period of colonial history to which she was a witness.
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Meisel, Jacqueline Susan. "The deepest South : a comparative analysis of issues of exile in the work of selected women writers from South Africa and the American South." Thesis, University of Cumbria, 2013. http://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/3991/.
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This thesis examines the ways in which exile, both actual and metaphorical, informs the work of four path breaking female writers from South Africa and the American South: Carson McCullers, Bessie Head, Zoë Wicomb and Dorothy Allison. In this study, exilic consciousness is closely linked to postcolonial, nomadic feminisms which can best be understood as liminal, as fundamentally ‘out of place’. The border-crossings involved here are not only geographical, they also signify a change in critical consciousness, as the foundational texts of this thesis – Rosi Braidotti’s Nomadic Feminism and Francoise Lionnet and Shu-Mei Shih’s Minor Transnationalism – indicate. By exploring writers who problematise the categories of race, gender, sexuality and class I demonstrate how these writers offer new ways of reading the postcolonial condition as nomadic, and I examine the shared processes that nations and individuals undergo as they experience political and personal liberation struggles. My thesis is divided into four main parts. The opening section offers both an introduction to, and rationale for, the study, providing historical and sociocultural contextualisation linking South Africa and the American South; it goes on to establish my choices of Carson McCullers and Dorothy Allison as the southern US writers in this study and Bessie Head and Zoë Wicomb as the South Africans. In the opening chapter I interrogate self-representation and variations in autobiography by the four writers. Chapter 2 has as its focus body and exilic consciousness in selected work by all four writers. My final chapter examines identity formation as situated subjectivity in the work of Allison and Wicomb who are foregrounded here. I contend that transnationalism need not be seen as inevitably homogenising; rather, I show that minority individuals and groups can establish agency through transversal, lateral networks.
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Schleppe, Beatriz Eugenia. "Empowering new identities in postcolonial literature by Francophone women writers." Thesis, 2003. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/fullcit?p3116178.
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Bradfield, Shelley-Jean. "An analysis of the theme of oppression in six narratives by South African women writers, 1925-1989." Thesis, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10210/7505.
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M.A.This study attempts to trace the interrelationship between literature and its historical contexts in six stories by South African women writers. Six South African writers have been selected because their work foregrounds the theme of oppression and because they are representative of the different groupings of the South African population. In her story "The Sisters", Pauline Smith explores the silencing effects of gender oppression in a patriarchy. In "The Apostasy of Carlina", Bertha Goudvis writes of women-on-women oppression between the white and black races. Jayapraga Reddy explores the complexities of intercultural relationships in "Friends". In "Let Them Eat Pineapples", Lizeka Mda explores the oppressive effects of industrial-development on the tribal system in Transkei. In "Last Look at Paradise Road", Gladys Thomas, like Goudvis before her, focuses on the racial discrimination practised by whites against blacks. Gcina Mhlope reveals women-on-women oppression practised both by white-on-black and black-on-black. A chronological ordering of these short stories reveals certain changes in the extent to which attitudes to oppression are revealed and criticized. This study suggests that while there has not been a significant decrease in the degree of oppression to which South African women have been subjected, the increasing awareness and exposure of gender oppression suggests the promise of self-actualization in the struggle for democracy in South Africa.
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Li, Zen-hui, and 李政慧. "Black, White, or Beyond Both: 'Mixed Race' Representations of Mulatta Character Identities in Three African-American Women Writers' Novels." Thesis, 2014. http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/30840481837781455303.
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博士國立中正大學
外國語文研究所
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Abstract This dissertation studies mixed race representations of mulatta character identities in three African-American women writers’ novels: Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892), Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). My argument is that the subject of mixed race identity not only brings together these three novels but also achieves mulatta characters’ emancipation in fiction through the following processes: the erasure of mixed race identification, the protest against mixed race lack of identity, and a mulatta woman’s self-empowerment of her identity as an individual mixed race subject. In order to explicate my views of the connection between representations of mulatta characters and mixed race identity, I use multiracialism as my theoretical approach—a new theory focused on American history of slavery, black-white miscegenation, and the one-drop rule—conditions shaping black-white mixed race individuals’ racial blackness in the United States. Moreover, because mulatta characters’ emancipation in fiction resulted from the subversive power of mixed race identity, I use the powerful multiracial discourse of mixed race individuals’ self-empowered view of individuality and uniqueness—Iamism discourse—as grounds for supporting my analytical views. Since my study is associated with American historical contexts of the construction of mixed race people’s racial blackness, my dissertation aims to offer my readers an overview of how the one-drop rule as a racist law and custom constructed black-white mixed race people’s black identity in the United States. For this reason, the introduction includes the follow aspects: a brief description of a mulatta story’s main point—her black-white biraciality—an overview of the texts’ critical perspectives, findings and a brief introduction to multiracialism. Chapter one introduces the one-drop rule, the tragic mulatta literary convention and my argument. Because the novels of Harper, Larsen and Hurston were published during the heyday of the Racial Uplift Movement—a political movement that united all coloreds as a black race after the Civil War—their depictions of the connection between mulatta characters’ black-white biraciality and mixed race identity were inseparable from the context of this political movement and its influence on African Americans. Hence, the main body of my dissertation—from chapter two to chapter four—features my analyses of how the values and ideologies of the Racial Uplift Movement informed Harper’s, Larsen’s, and Hurston’s representations of mulatta characters’ mixed race identity. Chapter two explores: first, Harper’s erasure of mixed race identification through her construction of a politically and collectively-oriented black identity based iii on the one-drop rule; second, the propagation of African-American racial politics and the Racial Uplift Movement through the noble mulatta—a politicalized black female ideal. Through these explorations, I show that Harper, as the pillar of the Racial Uplift Movement, constructed a politicalized black identity grounded on the one-drop rule actually reinforced racial binarism and the racist classification of blacks in the 1890s. Chapter three analyzes Larsen’s protest against mixed race lack of identity in Passing. Larsen’s opposition to the whites’ institutional and blacks’ ideological erasure of mixed race identification of her time revealed the destructive power of mixed race individuals’ lack of identity. For this reason, she uses her two mulatta heroines’ self-destruction to highlight how mixed race individuals were impacted by the force of the one-drop rule. Chapter four centers on how Hurston enables her mulatta heroine’s achievement of emancipation through a mixed race selfhood in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Using an anti-racist and egalitarian view of the mulatta heroine’s black-white biraciality, Hurston creates a mulatta character who holds an Iamism-oriented self-empowered view of her identity as an individual mixed race subject. In this way, Hurston enables her heroine to live beyond the one-drop rule in a racist world. In the concluding chapter, I further stress the connection between Hurston’s novel and her own Iamism-oriented view of her colored subjectivity. My contribution to the study of African-American women’s fiction and the tragic mulatta literary convention resides in the two following aspects: first, a multiracial interpretation of Hurston’s masterpiece, and second, the significance of mulatta characters’ emancipation in fiction. For me, both viewpoints bring one fact to focus—the vindication of individual freedom in a racist era, when all coloreds in the United States were forced to identify themselves with a politically and collectively-oriented black identity for the sake of African-American racial politics. Individual freedom is a belief grounded on the Declaration of Independence. Thus, the fictional emancipation of a mulatta in Hurston’s novel is an inspiring story of a colored woman’s claim of her powerful status as a subject—her capacity to be free from her socially constructed powerless black identity based on the one-drop rule. Key words: one-drop rule, miscegenation, tragic mulatta literary convention, passing, Racial Uplift Movement, Multiracialism, Iamism discourse iv
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Naidoo, Salachi. "Gender violence and resistance : representation of women's agency in selected literary works by Zimbabwean female writers." Thesis, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/22609.
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The aim of this study is to offer a critical analysis of representations of gender violence and resistance to such violence in selected novels by Zimbabwean women writers. A great deal of scholarship on Zimbabwean women writers focuses on well-known authors such as Yvonne Vera and Tsitsi Dangarembga. Even here, the critical emphasis tends to be on the representation of women’s suffering under patriarchy and their status as victims. Although the exposure of gendered suffering is important, these studies often fail to take into consideration the female characters’ agency and survival strategies, including how they go about rebuilding lives and identities in the aftermath of violence. This thesis argues that the fictional texts of other, lesser known Zimbabwean authors are similarly worthy of critical scrutiny, yielding as they can important insights into female characters’ resistance to gender violence. The current study analyses Zimbabwean women writers’ literary contributions to discourses on gender-based violence and explores how female characters have embraced the concept of agency to recreate their identities and to introduce a new gender ethos into the contexts of lives that are often shaped by severe restrictions and oppression. Violence is a phenomenon that is always shaped by specific cultural, ideological and socio-economic forces. As the study shows, characters’ identities are constituted by the complex intersections of a number of markers of difference, including their gender, race and class. This study thus regards identity as intersectional and takes all these factors into consideration in its analysis of the representations of violence and resistance in the selected texts. The study also aims to determine whether these literary representations offer any solutions to the difficulties of characters affected by or living with violence. The works critiqued are Lillian Masitera’s The Trail (2000), Valerie Tagwira’s The Uncertainty of Hope (2006), Virginia Phiri’s Highway Queen (2010) and Violet Masilo’s The African Tea Cosy (2010).English Studies
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Peay, Aisha Dolores. "Reading Democracy: Anthologies of African American Women's Writing and the Legacy of Black Feminist Criticism, 1970-1990." Diss., 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10161/1103.
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Taking as its pretext the contemporary moment of self-reflexive critique on the part of interdisciplinary programs like Women's Studies and American Studies,
The editors of such anthologies of African American women's writing and black feminist practice as Toni Cade Bambara's
Situating anthologies of black women's writing in relation to the social movement politics of the 1960s and 1970s, Reading Democracy explores how black feminist projects in the academy and the arts materialized the democratic principles of modern politics in the United States, understanding these principles as ethical desires that inspire self-constitution and creative and scholarly production. Constructing a literary critical and publication history, this dissertation identifies the democratic principles that the anthologies in this study materialize by analyzing them alongside the novels and short stories published during the 1970s and 1980s that they excerpt or otherwise reference, such as Toni Morrison's
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Pasi, Juliet Sylvia. "Theorising the environment in fiction: exploring ecocriticism and ecofeminism in selected black female writers’ works." Thesis, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/23789.
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Text in EnglishThis thesis investigates the relationship between humans and the nonhuman world or natural environment in selected literary works by black female writers in colonial and post-colonial Namibia and Zimbabwe. Some Anglo-American scholars have argued that many African writers have resisted the paradigms that inform much of global ecocriticism and have responded to it weakly. They contend that African literary feminist studies have not attracted much mainstream attention yet mainly to raise some issues concerning ecologically oriented literary criticism and writing. Given this unjust criticism, the study posits that there has been a growing interest in ecocriticism and ecofeminism in literary works by African writers, male and female, and they have represented the social, political (colonial and anti-colonial) and economic discourse in their works. The works critiqued are Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988) and The Book of Not (2006), Neshani Andreas’ The Purple Violet of Oshaantu (2001) and No Violet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013). The thrust of this thesis is to draw interconnections between man’s domination of nature and the subjugation and dominance of black women as depicted in different creative works. The texts in this study reveal that the existing Anglo-American framework used by some scholars to define ecocriticism and ecofeminism should open up and develop debates and positions that would allow different ways of reading African literature. The study underscored the possibility of black female creative works to transform the definition of nature writing to allow an expansion and all encompassing interpretation of nature writing. Contrary to the claims by Western scholars that African literature draws its vision of nature writing from the one produced by colonial discourse, this thesis argues that African writers and scholars have always engaged nature and the environment in multiple discourses. This study breaks new ground by showing that the feminist aspects of ecrocriticism are essential to cover the hermeneutic gap created by their exclusion. On closer scrutiny, the study reveals that African women writers have also addressed and highlighted issues that show the link between African women’s roles and their environment.
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Gordon-Chipembere, Natasha 1970. "From silence to speech, from object to subject: the body politic investigated in the trajectory between Sarah Baartman and contemporary circumcised African women's writing." Thesis, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/1660.
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NOTE FROM THE LIBRARY: PLEASE CONTACT THE AUTHOR AT indisunflower@yahoo.com OR CONSULT THE LIBRARY FOR THE FULL TEXT OF THIS THESIS....
This thesis investigates the trajectory traced from Sarah Baartman, a Khoisan woman exploited in Europe during the nineteenth century, to a contemporary writing workshop with circumcised, immigrant West African women in Harlem New York by way of a selection of African women's memoirs. The selected African women's texts used in this work create a new testimony of speech, fragmenting a historically dominant Euro-American gaze on African women's bodies. The excerpts form a discursive space for reclaiming self and as well as a defiant challenge to Western porno-erotic voyeurism. The central premise of this thesis is that while investigating Eurocentric (a)historical narratives of Baartman, one finds an implicitly racist and sexist development of European language employed not solely with Baartman, but contemporaneously upon the bodies of Black women of Africa and its Diaspora, focusing predominantly on the "anomaly of their hypersexual" genitals. This particular language applied to the bodies of Black women extends into the discourse of Western feminist movements against African female circumcision in the 21st century. Nawal el Saadawi, Egyptian writer and activist and Aman, a Somali exile, write autobiographical texts which implode a western "silent/uninformed circumcised African woman" stereotype. It is through their documented life stories that these African women claim their bodies and articulate nationalist and cultural solidarity. This work shows that Western perceptions of Female Circumcision and African women will be juxtaposed with African women's perceptions of themselves. Ultimately, with the Nitiandika Writers Workshop in Harlem New York, the politicized outcome of the women who not only write their memoirs but claim a vibrant sexual (not mutilated or deficient) identity in partnership with their husbands, ask why Westerners are more interested in their genitals than how they are able to provide food, shelter and education for the their families, as immigrants to New York. The works of Saadawi, Aman and the Nitandika writers disrupt and ultimately destroy this trajectory of dehumanization through a direct movement from an assumed silence (about their bodies, their circumcisions and their status as women in Africa) to a directed, historically and culturally grounded "alter" speech of celebration and liberation.English Studies
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Dyer, Kelly. "Light before midnight : a collection of poetry with reflexive documents regarding both the writing process and the writerly influences on this work." Thesis, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/10413/1449.
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