The Politics of (M)Othering: Womanhood, Identity and Resistance in African Literature

ISBN-13: 9780415137904 / Angielski / Miękka / 1996 / 256 str.

Obioma Nnaemeka

Opis

Over the last decade, post-colonial studies has become a defining feature in critical thought, but until very recently attention has been focused on areas other than Africa and its wealth of literature. This text represents an important shift of focus. African studies will certainly be setting the agenda in the future. Framed by the idea of mother in African literature - in its many forms such as motherland, mothertongue, motherwit, motherhood and mothering - this volume looks at its paradoxical location as both central and marginal. This study challenges the tools of analysis: whether, for example, we can use the tradition/modern paradigm in analyzing African literature. The collection as a whole is a feminist analysis which interrogates feminist theorizing; issues like victimhood, voice, agency, subjectivity, choice and sisterhood are recast in the light of African writing. Most significantly, the question of can we examine African literary texts depends upon a new way of seeing, a new form of cultural literacy; we need to examine first and foremost how and why texts say what they do say.

Recenzje

'The volume moves from one compelling analysis to another ... it makes a refreshing change from the many recent 'African women's writing' anthologies, where literary critics tend to trawl through a now familar canon of women's novels. - Wasafiri

Spis treści

Dedication, Acknowledgements, Obioma Nnaemeka Introduction: Imag(in)ing Knowledge, Power, and Subversion in the Margins Trinh T. Minh-ha Mother's Talk Charles Sugnet Nervous Conditions: Dangarembga's Feminist Reinvention of Fanon Ousseynou B. Traor'e Why the Snake-Lizard Killed His Mother: Inscribing and Decentering Nneka in Things Fall Apart, Peter Hitchcock The Eye and the Other: The Gaze and the Look in Egyptian Feminist Fiction Uzo Esonwanne Enlightenment Epistemology and Aesthetic Cognition: Mariama B^a's So Long a Letter Julianan Nfah-Abbenyi Calixthe Beyala's femme-fillette: Womanhood and the Politics of (M)Othering Cynthia Ward Bound to Matter: The Father's Pen and Mother Tongues Celeste Fraser Delgado Mother Tongues and Childless Women: The Construction of Kenyan Womanhood Huma Ibrahim Ontological Victimhood: Other Bodies in Madness and Exile, Toward a Third World Feminist Epistemology Obioma Nnaemeka Urban Spaces, Woman's Places: Polygamy as Sign in Mariama B^a's Novels Ren'ee Larrier Reconstructing Motherhood: Francophone, African Women Autobiographers Fran,coise Lionnet Geographies of Pain: Captive Bodies and Violent Acts in the fictions of Gayl Jones, Bessie Head and Myriam Warner-Vieyra, Contributors

O autorze

Obioma Nnaemeka