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1
Ufuoma, Davies. "Alternative Realities, Transformation and the Goddess Myth in African Women’s Fiction: A Sociological Perspective of Flora Nwapa’s Efuru." International Journal of Research and Review 10, no. 7 (July 10, 2023): 253–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.52403/ijrr.20230732.
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African women writers have engaged in rhetorics and performative strategies, designed to project a sense of self redefinition for women in Africa. This is because in many African societies, women are largely invisible. However, over the past few decades, the narrative seems to be encouraging. Women writers have started contesting gendered roles, institutionalized structures and power relations that define their realities. Thus the paper examines Flora Nwapa’s utilization of the goddess mythology, to create alternative realities for self-recreation of the African woman. The author demonstrates that Nwapa weaves the goddess myth in the plotline to assert a revisionist order in the trado-cultural space. The goddess imagery is invested to construct a woman-centered ideology that supports women to attain psychological, economic spiritual and emotional succuor away from the realms of tradition. A sociological theoretical perspective is deployed for elucidation. Keywords: goddess myth, sociology, alternative realities, fiction.
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Hossain, Md Amir. "Doris Lessing’s Fiction as Feminist Projections." International Journal of English and Cultural Studies 1, no. 1 (March 6, 2018): 23. http://dx.doi.org/10.11114/ijecs.v1i1.3081.
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Doris Lessing, an unrivaled novelist in the literary genres around the globe, portrays the fundamental problems of women as well as social system of her times. Lessing searches for new models to communicate the experiences of a blocked woman writer, who spends her early life in Africa, becomes an active and a disappointed communist, who is a politically committed writer, a mother, a wife, or a mistress sometimes a woman. With her very keen and subtle attitude, Lessing wants to present women’s psychological conflicts between marriage and love; motherhood and profession, unfairness of the double standard; alienation of a single career woman; hollowness of marriage in the traditional order and society. Lessing portrays her women in various social problems and with various perspectives of male against female. She tries to awaken women community to protest against the patriarchy through her feminist writings. For this purpose, this research paper would like to examine the psychological conflicts and traumatic experiences of powerful heroines, including- Anna Wulf of The Golden Notebook, Mary Turner of The Grass Is Singing, and Clefts of The Cleft.
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Masumbe, Charity Besingi. "Courting The Id in Dystopian Fiction: A Freudian Study of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace." Global Academic Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 6, no. 03 (June 8, 2024): 98–103. http://dx.doi.org/10.36348/gajhss.2024.v06i03.001.
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This article explored the moral decadence in post-Apartheid South Africa and examined the injuries that such immorality had on the psyche of the post-apartheid South African woman. It further analysed the necessary shifts in perception and interpretation that depressed South African woman had to grapple with in the face of the immoralities that ensued and identified the new vision of self, art and the world which women invent to liberate themselves from the shackles of morally decay societies. From this perspective, the work anchors on the hypothesis that most post-colonial African societies build immoral societal boundaries which give room to high level of immorality, thus creating avenues for varied philosophies and new modes of survival. Written against the backdrop of Pyscho-Analytic theory, the work concludes that there is the dire need for the moralization and reconstruction of public institutions for mental stability and nation building.
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Huber, Loreta, and Evelina Jonaitytė. "Oral Narrative Genres as Communicative Dialogic Resources and their Correlation to African Short Fiction." Respectus Philologicus, no. 37(42) (April 20, 2020): 137–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.15388/respectus.2020.37.42.45.
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Oral and written storytelling traditions in Africa developed at the same time and influenced each other in many ways. In the twentieth century, the relation between the deeply rooted oral tradition and literary traditions intensified.We aim to reveal literary analysis tools that help to trace ways how oral narrative genres found reflection in African short fiction under analysis. A case study is based on two short stories by women writers, The Rain Came by Grace Ogot and The Lovers by Bessie Head. Images and symbols both, in oral and written traditions in Africa, as well as the way they evolved and extended in a literary genre of short fiction are considered within the framework of hermeneutics, reader reception theory and feminist literary criticism.The results obtained in the study prove that oral narrative genres interact with literary genres, though most importantly, women’s writing as a literary category and images embodied in the short stories play a decisive role and deviation from the images embodied in African oral tradition.
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Baderoon, Gabeba. "The Ghost in the House: Women, Race, and Domesticity in South Africa." Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 1, no. 2 (June 17, 2014): 173–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/pli.2014.17.
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AbstractIn South Africa, the house is a haunted place. Apartheid’s separate publics also required separate private lives and separate leisures in which to practice ways of living apartheid’s ideological partitions into reality. This essay analyzes the compulsive interest in black domesticity that has characterized South Africa since the colonial period and shows that domestic labor in white homes has historically shaped the entry of black women into public space in South Africa. In fact, so strong is the latter association that theDictionary of South African English on Historical Principlesreveals that in South African English the wordmaiddenotes both “black woman” and “servant.” This conflation has generated fraught relations of domesticity, race, and subjectivity in South Africa. Contemporary art about domestic labor by Zanele Muholi and Mary Sibande engages with this history. In their art, the house is a place of silences, ghosts, and secrets. Precursors to these recent works can be found in fiction, including Sindiwe Magona’s short stories about domestic workers in her collectionLiving, Loving and Lying Awake at Night(1994) and Zoë Wicomb’s novelPlaying in the Light(2006), in which a woman passing for white allows her mother into her house only under the pretense that she is a family servant. Muholi and Sibande have engaged the legacy of black women in white households by revisiting the ghosts of the house through performance, sculpture, and photography. Both were inspired by the intimate reality of their mothers’ experiences as domestic servants, and in both cases the artist’s body is central to the pieces, through installations based on body casts, performance, embodied memories, and the themes of haunted absences, abandonment, and longing.
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Siddique, Rumana. "“WO”man of the People:." Crossings: A Journal of English Studies 8 (August 1, 2017): 179–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.59817/cjes.v8i.143.
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Gendered assumptions of nationalism have been an integral part of liberation and post-liberation theory and fiction resulting in the construction of disempowered national identities for women in the modern African states. The narratives of idealization and mythologizing sketch women in the developing literary canvas as symbolic or biological figures who had no active social or political roles or voices. This paper focuses on how gender roles in national identity and nation-building have evolved in the works of the major male African writer Chinua Achebe. It examines the narratives that have reinforced or challenged Achebe with particular focus on how the portrayal of women in his final novel stands him as a progressive in terms of a new vision of the role and space of women in modern Africa.
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Munos, Delphine. "Afrasian Entanglements and Generic Ambiguities in Sultan Somjee’s Bead Bai." Matatu 52, no. 1 (November 22, 2021): 188–207. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18757421-05201012.
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Abstract This article looks at Sultan Somjee’s Bead Bai (2012) which focuses on Sakina, a member of the Satpanth Ismaili community living in mid-twentieth century Kenya. Based on nine years of research and interviews with Khoja women who now reside in Western Europe and North America, Bead Bai is generally described as a “historical novel” or an “ethnographic fiction,” yet it also can be thought of as pertaining to the genre of what Brett Smith et al. (2015) call “ethnographic creative nonfiction.” I discuss the ways in which the ‘genre-bending’ aspects of Bead Bai participate in retracing the little-known history of Afrasian entanglements for Asian African women who sorted out, arranged and looked after ethnic beads during colonial times in East Africa. More specifically, I will suggest that, by toying with the boundary between fiction and ethnography, Somjee opens new gendered avenues for reinserting the category of the imaginary at the heart of Afrasian entanglements.
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Koussouhon, Léonard A., and Ida Tchibozo-Laine. "Tenor and Interpersonal Meaning in Amma Darko’s Fiction: A Feminist Approach." Studies in English Language Teaching 4, no. 4 (November 29, 2016): 650. http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/selt.v4n4p650.
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<p><em>Amma Darko overtly identifies herself as a spokeswoman of/for voiceless and defenseless women in her first three novels, Beyond the Horizon (1995), The Housemaid (1998) and Faceless (2003). By choosing women as protagonists of the aforementioned novels, Darko aims at unveiling and satirizing the detrimental effects of patriarchal societies in Africa and advocating for a society wherein exploitation and domination of men do not exist. In her literary works, Darko uses of linguistic resources. Thus, under the banner of Systemic Functional Linguistics (henceforth, SFL), this work analyzes the tenor of discourse and interpersonal meaning in three extracts drawn from the abovementioned novels. The description and interpretation of the linguistic resources seek to exude how the participants in the selected extracts establish and maintain interpersonal relationships therein. Besides, with the SFL theory, this study aims to unveil the feminist voice and struggle of Darko as encoded in the language of her fiction under scrutiny. </em></p>
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Fasselt, Rebecca. "Crossing genre boundaries: H. J. Golakai's Afropolitan chick-lit mysteries." Feminist Theory 20, no. 2 (February 25, 2019): 185–200. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1464700119831538.
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Crime fiction by women writers across the globe has in recent years begun to explore the position of women detectives within post-feminist cultural contexts, moving away from the explicit refusal of the heterosexual romance plot in earlier feminist ‘hard-boiled’ fiction. In this article, I analyse Hawa Jande Golakai's The Lazarus Effect (2011) and The Score (2015) as part of the tradition of crime fiction by women writers in South Africa. Joining local crime writers such as Angela Makholwa, Golakai not only questions orthodox conceptions of gender and sexuality in traditional iterations of the crime novel, but also combines elements of chick-lit with the crime plot. Reading the archetypal quest structure of the two genres against the background of Sara Ahmed's cultural critique of happiness, I argue that Golakai inventively recasts the recent sub-genre of the chick-lit mystery from the perspective of an Afropolitan detective. Her detective tenaciously undercuts the future-directed happiness script that structures conventional chick-lit and detective novels with their respective focus on finding a fulfilling heterosexual, monogamous romantic relationship, and the resolution of the crime and restoration of order. In this way, the novels defy the frequently assumed apolitical nature of chick-lit texts and also allow us to reimagine the idea of Afropolitanism, outside of its dominant consumerist form, as a critical Afropolitanism that emerges from an openness to be affected by the unhappiness and suffering of others.
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Kibble, Steve, and Ray Bush. "Reform of Apartheid and Continued Destabilisation in Southern Africa." Journal of Modern African Studies 24, no. 2 (June 1986): 203–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0022278x00006856.
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Continuous pressure against the South African Government has led to what previously seemed unthinkable: the reform of apartheid. Strikes from 1973 onwards, the Soweto revolt in 1976, the increasing resistance from school and consumer boycotts, the strengthening black trade-union movement and mass political organisations, and the unceasing campaign by the African National Congress, have led the State President, P. W. Botha, to declare in early 1986 that apartheid in its present form cannot be maintained, despite strong reactions from sections of Afrikaner interests. Many of the structures thought essential to racial segregation are to go: the pass laws controlling the movement of African men and women, the fiction that the ‘Bantustans’ are ’independent’ or ‘national’ states, and that urban blacks are citizens of other countries. There is even the promise of political representation for Africans. These measures appear to mark the end of Botha's attempt to create a divided black working class — some with residence rights in white-only areas, and others, notably unskilled migrants, without. The specific shape of the more racially-integrated South Africa which Botha promises remains unclear. It is not surprising in a recession that the President appears to have recognised the inappropriateness and disproportionate cost which maintaining structures of black recruitment to white employers has on the state's exchequer — not including the cost of policing influx control.
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Akbar, Rifqi. "CHALLENGE THE STEREOTYPES: ISLAM VOICES AS A FORM OF DECOLONIAL FEMINISM IN UZMA JALALUDDIN’S NOVEL AYESHA AT LAST." Language Literacy: Journal of Linguistics, Literature, and Language Teaching 8, no. 1 (June 29, 2024): 123–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.30743/ll.v8i1.9065.
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Halal Fiction is a sub-genre that seeks to represent Muslims in a way that reduces Islamophobia. Islamophobia often perpetuates grand narratives that marginalize women's identities, particularly in regions where the population is predominantly Muslim, such as the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. A descriptive-qualitative approach is one methodological strategy within decolonialism, aimed at redefining heteropatriarchal Islamic principles. This approach can be informed by feminist decolonial theory, as proposed by Françoise Verges. The novel Ayesha at Last addresses inequality in marriage and Islamic paradigms through its characters Ayesha and Farzana. This portrayal challenges the perception of Islam as immoral, particularly among Muslim women. Farzana believes that Ayesha has become a moderate Muslim woman, eroding traditional Muslim values, which she deems unsuitable for her son Khalid to marry into. The research aims to challenge stereotypes of Muslim values, advocating for equality between men and women regardless of geopolitical and educational status. The findings reveal that through the character of Ayesha, who transitions from traditional to moderate Islam, the novel demonstrates that Islam is a religion that upholds equal values between men and women, without any inherent differences or harm to one another.
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Byrne, Deirdre C. "Give the Black Girl the Remote: De-colonising and Depatriarchalising Knowledge and Art in Black Panther and Colour Me Melanin." Image & Text, no. 37 (November 1, 2023): 1–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2617-3255/2023/n37a36.
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This article explores two texts set in Africa to determine to what extent they exhibit decolonial and anti-patriarchal impulses. They are Ryan Coogler's 2018 film, Black Panther, and the adult colouring book, Colour Me Melanin (Kekana 2019), which features 27 portraits of African women paired with 27 poems inspiring pride in women's African heritage. Black Panther features a Black superhero: the hypermasculine T'Challa, although its technological genius is not T'Challa (the eponymous Black Panther), but his sister Shuri, disparaged by traditionalists in Wakanda as 'a child'. Despite her irreverent and iconoclastic approach to tradition, sixteen-year-old Shuri is 'the smartest person in the world, smarter than Tony Stark [Iron Man]' (Malik 2023). Despite these promising features, the film's portrayal of Shuri - a Black girl nerd who is manifestly her brother's equal in the arts of war and technology - stops short of a complete depatriarchalisation of the norm that reserves superhero status for men. Further, Black Panther contains a number of concerning representations that reinforce, rather than disrupting, the colonial view of Africa. Colour Me Melanin may be called speculative fiction in that it points to a future that is yet to come as it shifts the locus of women's beauty away from whiteness and places it firmly in the domain of Black African women's embodiment. All the same, some aspects of this multimodal text signal its affinity for colonial taxonomies and ways of thinking about ethnicity.
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Gikandi, Simon. "Paule Marshall and the search for the African diaspora." New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 73, no. 1-2 (January 1, 1999): 83–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/13822373-90002586.
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[First paragraph]The Fiction of Paule Marshall: Reconstructions of History, Culture, and Gender. DOROTHY HAMER DENNISTON. Knoxville: University of Tennesee Press, 1995. xxii + 187 pp. (Paper US$ 15.00)Toward Wholeness in Paule Marshall's Fiction. JOYCE PETTIS.Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995. xi + 173 pp. (Cloth US$ 29.50)Black and Female: Essays on Writings by Black Women in the Diaspora. BRITA LINDBERG-SEYERSTED. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1994. 164 pp. (Paper n.p.)Literary history has not been very kind to Paule Marshall. Even in the early 1980s when literature produced by African-American women was gaining prominence among general readers and drawing the attention of critics, Marshall was still considered to be an enigmatic literary figure, somehow important in the canon but not one of its trend setters. As Mary Helen Washington observed in an influential afterword to Brown Girl, Brownstones, although Marshall had been publishing novels and short stories since the early 1950s, and was indeed the key link between African-American writers of the 1940s and those of the 1960s, she was just being "discovered" in the 1980s. While there has always been a small group of scholars, most notably Kamau Brathwaite, who have called attention to the indispensable role Marshall has played in the shaping of the literary canon of the African Diaspora, and of her profound understanding of the issues that have affected the complex formation and survival of African-derived cultures in the New World, many critics have found it difficult to locate her within the American, African-American, and Caribbean traditions that are the sources of her imagination and the subject of her major works. Marshall has embraced all these cultures in more profound ways than her more famous contemporaries have, but she has not gotten the accolades that have gone to lesser writers like Alice Walker. It is indeed one of the greatest injustices of our time that Walker's limited understanding of the cultures and peoples of the African Diaspora has become the point of reference for North American scholars of Africa, the Caribbean, and South America while Marshall's scholastic engagement with questions of Diaspora has not drawn the same kind of interest.
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Atuwo, Abdulbasir Ahmad. "The Writer and Society: A Literary Study of Balaraba Ramat Yakubu’s Reflections on Hausa Society." Scholars International Journal of Linguistics and Literature 5, no. 2 (February 28, 2022): 72–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.36348/sijll.2022.v05i02.006.
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Styles were used by different authors to ensure a proper channeling of messages from their novels to the targeted readers. Balaraba Ramat Yakubu who is among the few reputable Hausa women authors combined the position of mother, elder, leader, and responsible married woman. At the time she strived hard to acquire what can sustain her family and relatives she wrote many Hausa fiction books in which she depicted her wisdom and opinions in exposing the need to have a decent society base on her life experience, a society that respects women dignity, display honesty, discipline and promote a violent free society and encourage respect for one another. Balaraba Ramat Yakubu has tried to symbolize some of these issues in her books as her contribution towards sustaining responsible society in Nigeria, Africa, or the world at large. Styles as used by authors is a toolbox in the manipulation of their talents to expose their mission in their works. Balaraba Ramat used her styles to display her opinions on how different dimensions of our lives should be. This paper analyzes how Balaraba Ramat Yakubu addressed some of these issues and analyzes them. The paper used her Hausa novels and the academic works done on them and other things related to her. The paper, however, makes contact with both primary and secondary sources for further justifications. It however concludes with the findings that in Hausa society, men remain behind their wives in whatever they do to earn their lively hood as long as their strives do not contradict Islam and Hausa culture. Again going by the power of the pen, the paper also encourages writers especially women to use their pen as their powerful weapon to fight all forms of insurgency which rendered hundreds of thousands of women and children victims of circumstances in many African countries.
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Ugwu, Agozie Uzo. "Reflection of History and Struggle in Modern African Drama: A Reassessment of the Historical and Dramatic Characters in Emeka Nwabueze’s The Dragon’s Funeral." Nile Journal of English Studies 2, no. 2 (April 1, 2016): 18. http://dx.doi.org/10.20321/nilejes.v2i2.68.
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Historical facts evidently have often time provided source materials for the modern African playwright in creating his story. The committed playwright combines the fact of history, blends it with artistic ingenuity and presents a dramatic experience of a people. This combination of facts of history with fiction could be referred to as “faction”. The facts of history may include struggle for emancipation, war, famine, outbreak of a disease, political instability, fashion, terrorism, natural disaster, colonialism, imperialism, neo-colonialism, etc. It is in view of this that this paper surveys the struggle by Nigerian women during the colonial period for their emancipation out of the evils of colonialism and economic exploitation. The gallant Nigerian women of Aba in 1929, who vehemently challenged the British colonial administration of heavy tax imposition on Nigerians, have been represented in dramatic form by Emeka Nwabueze in his play The Dragon’s Funeral. This work has done a reassessment of the major characters in the play. The aim is to see how these dramatic characters in the play conform to the actual historical characters. For the purpose of dramaturgy, the playwright seems to have added some dramatic techniques; like the aesthetics of storytelling to provide a more vivid dramatic experience. The representation of historical characters in the play provides obvious evidences of the reflection of history and struggle in modern Africa drama and also emphasises the efficacy of modern African plays as viable tools for the documentation of history.
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Gavristova, T. M. "Noo Saro-Wiwa: in Search of Africa." Asia and Africa today, no. 5 (December 15, 2024): 71–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.31857/s032150750030863-1.
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The turn of the 20th–21st centuries was marked by the flourishing of African and especially Nigerian literature. Among those who became famous in the 21st century are Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Teju Cole, Chigozie Obioma, etc. Noo Saro-Wiwa, a British writer of Nigerian origin, author of the best-selling books “Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria” (2012) and “Black Ghosts: A Journey into the Lives of Africans in China” (2023), can be considered the Queen of contemporary travel writing. The special appeal of her works lies in the masterly combination of travel literature and memoirs. A detailed description of events’ chronicle, travel impressions, air and nature, people and conversations with them turns her books into a real testimony of the era and tends to be documentary prose. She gives preference to it due to the fact that “truth is more important than fiction”. The daughter of the famous Nigerian poet and publicist, political activist and environmentalist Ken Saro-Wiwa (1941–1995), the writer focused the readers’ attention on many of the most pressing political, economic, social, environmental, and demographic problems. These include colonialism and decolonization, racism and gender inequality, emigration and the history of Diaspora. The writer is of particular interest in the amazing mobility of the Chinese, internal and external migration, their activities in Africa. She admires the nature, ancient and medieval culture of China and at the same time records manifestations of racial hostility of the Chinese towards Africans, considering them unacceptable. She compares Chinese and Africans, identifying similarities and differences. And if addressing Nigeria’s past and present is her Mission, China is an option, one of many. Currently, she is one of the most engaged authors and most famous African women, winner of a number of prestigious literary awards.
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Drage, Eleanor. "Science, Myth, and Spirits: Re-inventions of Science Fiction by Women of Colour Writers, Between Africa, Europe and the Caribbean." Studies on Home and Community Science 11, no. 2 (January 8, 2018): 77–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09737189.2017.1420391.
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Suvorov, Mikhail N. "Woman and Yemen in Three Novels by Nadia al-Kawkabani (Yemen)." Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. Asian and African Studies 15, no. 1 (2023): 88–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.21638/spbu13.2023.106.
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Among scholars of literature, there is a discussion about whether modern Arab women write fiction differently from their male counterparts. Some argue that women writers have special concerns which result from their specific experiences in Muslim society and determine not only the thematic spectrum of their works, but also a specific, sometimes vague manner of their literary expression. This discussion is based mostly on the works of prominent women writers from Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, North Africa, sometimes Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf States. Yemen has not received much attention in this discussion, as well as in literary studies in general. This article examines to what extent the suggested female, or “feminist”, manner of writing is manifested in the works of Yemeni novelist and short story writer Nadia al-Kawkabani, who is one of the most prolific women writers in her country. In her three novels, Not More Than Love (2006), Submissive Wives (2009), and My Sanaa (2013), “feminist” topics are touched upon repeatedly, but practically none of them is represented by a detailed story with a sufficient degree of sentiment and psychologism. On the contrary, a great deal of attention in these novels is given to the culture and modern history of Yemen, and the narrative, like in many male writers’ works, is dominated by sociopolitical issues. One may argue that Yemen in Nadia al-Kawkabani’s novels prevails over the “feminist” issue.
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Henry, Nancy. "GEORGE ELIOT AND THE COLONIES." Victorian Literature and Culture 29, no. 2 (September 2001): 413–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150301002091.
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Women are occasionally governors of prisons for women, overseers of the poor, and parish clerks. A woman may be ranger of a park; a woman can take part in the government of a great empire by buying East India Stock.— Barbara Bodichon, A Brief Summary in Plain Language, of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women (1854)ON OCTOBER 5, 1860, GEORGE HENRY LEWES VISITED a solicitor in London to consult about investments. He wrote in his journal: “[The Solicitor] took me to a stockbroker, who undertook to purchase 95 shares in the Great Indian Peninsular Railway for Polly. For £1825 she gets £1900 worth of stock guaranteed 5%” (qtd. in Ashton, Lewes 210). Thus Marian Evans, called Polly by her close friends, known in society as Mrs. Lewes and to her reading public as George Eliot, became a shareholder in British India. Whether or not Eliot thought of buying stock as taking part in the government of a great empire, as her friend Barbara Bodichon had written in 1854, the 5% return on her investment was a welcome supplement to the income she had been earning from her fiction since 1857. From 1860 until her death in 1880, she was one of a select but growing number of middle-class investors who took advantage of high-yield colonial stocks.1 Lewes’s journals for 1860–1878 and Eliot’s diaries for 1879–80 list dividends from stocks in Australia, South Africa, India, and Canada. These include: New South Wales, Victoria, Cape of Good Hope, Cape Town Rail, Colonial Bank, Oriental Bank, Scottish Australian, Great Indian Peninsula, Madras. The Indian and colonial stocks make up just less than half of the total holdings. Other stocks connected to colonial trade (East and West India Docks, London Docks), domestic stocks (the Consols, Regents Canal), and foreign investments (Buenos Aires, Pittsburgh and Ft. Wayne) complete the portfolio.2
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Djeddai, Imen, and Fella Benabed. "The Strong Binti in Nnedi Okorafor’s African American Science Fiction." Traduction et Langues 19, no. 2 (December 31, 2020): 210–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.52919/translang.v19i2.374.
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By looking carefully at the history of science fiction, we can notice that African American authors have been excluded from the scene for a long time due to the “whiteness” of the genre in terms of writing and publication. In addition to racism, sexism persists in the science fiction community. Hence, marginalized black women writers of science fiction try to include more black women characters in their literary works. Through Binti, Binti: Home, and Binti: The Night Masquerade, Nnedi Okorafor focuses on the experience of being black and woman in a technological society of the future. This study discusses how Okorafor provides sharp comments on the lives of black women in America in terms of “race” and “gender.” She challenges the stereotypical image of the black woman as “other” through the subversion of white norms and traditions. In this analysis, we use “Afrofuturism” and “black feminism” as a theoretical framework since “Afrofuturism” tackles African American issues related to twentieth-century technoculture, and “black feminism” deals with black women empowerment. The major character, Binti, proves that she deserves to reach a higher position as an empowered girl of the future, which gives her self-confidence to be autonomous and to have control over her own life.
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Anasiudu, Okwudiri. "Mobility Trope: Travelling as a Signature of the Afropolitan Female Quest for Existential Subjectivity in Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street." Journal of Gender and Power 14, no. 2 (December 1, 2020): 123–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/jgp-2020-0017.
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Abstract The mobility trope is a key aesthetic feature in Afropolitan fiction and it crystalizes as the act of travelling which has become an important subject-matter in postnationalist African fictions by women such as Chimamanda Adichie, Noviolet Bulawayo or Chika Unigwe as a way of intervention on the debate of the Afropolitan female quest for existential subjectivity in 21st century African fiction. This is against the backdrop of negative essentialism and the exertions of patriarchy evident in the representation of African women’s in 20th century African fiction. Drawing from the foregoing, this paper interrogates Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street (Hence OBSS) to demonstrate how the writer deploys mobility trope which manifest as travelling as a signature of the Afropolitan female quest for existential subjectivity. I argue in this paper that, though existing studies on OBSS portray Efe, Sisi, Ama and Joyce as exported commodities in neoliberal sex market, their relocation however opens up a new vista to understanding their motivation and quest for new subjectivity, empowered fluid agency, individual autonomy and translation into Afropolitans. This is within Achille Mbembe’s phenomenological criticism of Afropolitanism and a methology that is based on qualitative content analysis of the text—OBSS. On the long run, the identity which travelling confers on the female characters is fluid, as they represent an African being in a globalized world and a strong sense of cultural mobility.
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Chaouib, Fatiha. "La réécriture du mythe dans La femme sans sépulture d’Assia Djebar." Traduction et Langues 11, no. 2 (December 31, 2012): 75–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.52919/translang.v11i2.583.
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Rewriting of the myth in “The Woman Without a Burial Place”by Assia Djebar
In this article, we propose to study the rewriting of one of the founding myths: "Ulysses and the Sirens". Indeed, with literature, mythical data are transformed first into matters of analogy, then of confrontation, and finally of analysis and reconstruction. The challenge that makes the passage from myth to literature lies in the word "creation" that Assia Djebar works through a concerted rewriting with several voices, more than one language, more than one meaning. Through myth, the author sheds light on the past, inserting forgotten events into the present of fiction, thus giving life to buried voices.This research allows us to consider that Assia Djebar replaces Ulysses in the epilogue. She is Ulysses in the feminine; "the traveler", "the foreigner" who has spent her life traveling the world. She has traveled from one continent to another, from North Africa to Europe to the United States. She seems to like this life full of nomadism, Hania the heroine's daughter addresses her words: "O you who took a long time to come back, she continues in a wavering voice, you Houria's niece died next door from our home, you've done, it seems almost around the world, but what to blame you for, you came back to us, isn't that the main thing? ». She returned the narrator / author to Caesarea to recharge her batteries, to recover her past, a forgotten piece of history. She does the same as the Homeric Ulysses who aimed to recover his past as a present. She returns to the patios of the women of Caesarea, today's sirens, she listens to their hidden words, these voices that tell the story of Algeria on the women's side, inside the houses, cloistered. These women reconstruct the past down to the smallest detail. They meditate in the space of silence, remember the past, build the puzzle little by little and make the story of Zoulikha the anthem of all the women of Algeria, those who died for their country."The visitor", "the foreigner not so foreign" listens to this word, this song, without being attached to the mast and assigns herself the task of transcribing the song of these women filled with tenderness and sadness in writing. The author is consumed by the desire to preserve the story of her women from oblivion to the point where she materializes this gesture by putting it on paper.These sirens of Caesarea are all messengers who come to say what we don't know, what we don't see, What happened inside the patios and in the streets of Caesarea, what is forgotten, what is hidden.Inside the houses, these women ensure the chain of transmission, fight against oblivion. However, the major oversight that arises in this novel is that of the women's fight for independence, their resistance, their mourning. History is the prerogative of the women of Algeria that Assia Djebar "Ulysses in feminine" has given herself the mission of saving her from "oblivion" because it turns out that it is the real death. Assia Djebar's story is constructed to make room for this word, to give it the impetus to take flight, to go beyond the walls of the patios, to reach us. Like the Homeric story that was able to transcend the ages to arrive at the center of the work "La Femme Sans Sepulture".
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Schneiderman, Leo. "Toni Morrison: Mothers and Daughters." Imagination, Cognition and Personality 14, no. 4 (June 1995): 273–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.2190/wb6p-hcbn-03yy-lpbr.
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The present article analyzes Morrison's novels with emphasis on the conflicted emotions of fictional African-American mothers in relation to their children. Of special interest is Morrison's depiction of the mother's role in shaping the individuation process of her daughters in a matriarchal, father-absent context. Also examined is Morrison's treatment of intergenerational continuity and the unique role of the grandmother against a background of social change. Such change is interpreted by Morrison as involving conflict between the norms of traditional, rural, folkloric black culture, and the pressures of mainstream American society. Morrison's fiction, taken as a whole, is viewed as illustrating the key role of the African-American mother in maintaining survival strategies developed by black women historically. The fate of black men in Morrison's fictional universe is also considered, along with pertinent implications for understanding African-American patterns of socialization in the broadest sense.
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Łobodziec, Agnieszka. "Intersections of African-American Womanist Literary Approaches and Paradigms of Ethical Literary Criticism." Interlitteraria 22, no. 2 (January 16, 2018): 297. http://dx.doi.org/10.12697/il.2017.22.2.8.
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Although black American womanist literary perspectives and ethical literary criticism theory emerged from different socio-cultural contexts, a number of intersections between the two can be discerned. One of the objectives of this paper is to analyze the reasons for which some Chinese scholars and African-American women literary theoreticians are skeptical of mainstream Western literary criticism schools, which they view as insufficient for exploring works of literature derived from fusions of non-Western and Western cultural contexts. Secondly, the paper elucidates the particular value systems exhibited by fictional characters portrayed by the African-American women writers under survey. At this juncture, the means by which the writers challenge value systems based upon Western essentialist racial conceptualizations will be given primary attention. Also, the historical context of the development of womanist ethics and literary practice, particularly the manifestation of original social ethics in response to historical oppression, will be focused upon. Lastly, the didactic function of womanist literature will be considered because, more often than not, black American woman writers have endeavored to produce fiction that serves as guideposts towards conflict resolutions, involving, to a great extent, revaluation of mainstream values.
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DAVIES, Rebecca Ufuoma. "Gender Issues for Social Reformation in Contemporary African Women's Fiction." European Modern Studies Journal 7, no. 2 (May 25, 2023): 54–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.59573/emsj.7(2).2023.06.
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Contemporary African women's fiction has been a significant site of exploration for issues of gender and its intersections with other identity markers such as race, class, and sexuality. This paper provides an overview of the gender issues present in contemporary African women's fiction and analyzes how these authors are engaging with feminist thoughts and theories in their works. The paper begins by exploring the patriarchal nature of African societies and how this has been challenged by African women writers through their portrayal of female characters who resist societal norms and expectations. The paper then analyzes the various forms of oppression that African women face, including sexual violence, female genital mutilation, and forced marriages. Additionally, the paper considers the role of African women in politics and how they are represented in literature. The paper argues that contemporary African women writers are challenging Western feminist thoughts and developing forms of feminist theory that are more inclusive and relevant to African contexts. The study concludes that African women's fiction is an important site of feminist discourse and offers valuable insights into the gender issues that affect African women today.
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Kyobutungi Tumwesigye, Alice Jossy. "Young Adult Vulnerabilities in the Fiction of a Ugandan Woman Writer." Global Research in Higher Education 5, no. 1 (March 8, 2022): p22. http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/grhe.v5n1p22.
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Questions of identity, power, autonomy and vulnerability carry a particular weight in cultures that have emerged from colonialism. Although few writers of fiction focus on the conflicts between African and European characters, a focus on power and marginalisation remains. One category in which this focus may be plainly seen is writing for and about young people. The study’s aim was to analyse young adult fiction written by a Ugandan female author, Barbara Kimenye to investigate this writing to find out how young adult vulnerability is depicted in literature. Although literature targeting young people in Uganda has flourished and though issues of limited representation have been scrutinised in literary studies, like gender discrimination, very limited attention has been accorded young adult representation in literature. This research analyses fiction written by a female author Barbara Kimenye to expand knowledge about the criticism of young adult representation in literature with particular focus on young adult vulnerability in an adult dominated world. The methodology was mainly qualitative research design, where a document analysis method was used to aid analysis and make critical appreciation of the fictional works. The study investigated the state of young adult characters in literature with special focus on their vulnerability.
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Donawerth, Jane. "Body Parts: Twentieth-Century Science Fiction Short Stories by Women." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 119, no. 3 (May 2004): 474–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/003081204x20532.
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This essay is a feminist, historical exploration of body parts in short science fiction stories by women. In early-twentieth-century stories about prostheses, blood transfusion, and radioactive experiments, Clare Winger Harris, Kathleen Ludwick, and Judith Merril use body parts to explore fears of damage to masculine identity by war, of alienation of men from women, and of racial pollution. In stories from the last quarter of the twentieth century, the South American author Angélica Gorodischer depicts a housewife's escape from oppressive domestic technology through time travel in which she murders male leaders, while Eileen Gunn offers a critique of bioengineering and sociobiology, satirizing fears of women in modern business and of erasure of identity in global corporate structures. An end-of-the-century fiction by the African American Akua Lezli Hope imagines a black woman altered through cosmetic surgery to become a tenor sax and critiques technologies that transform women's bodies into cultural signifiers of social function and class.
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Shrutika, Shrutika. "Fluid Identities and Memories in Rivers Solomon's The Deep." International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences 9, no. 2 (2024): 267–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.22161/ijels.92.40.
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In recent years, there has been a noticeable shift in the realm of speculative fantasy fiction towards incorporating contemporary issues, particularly those concerning marginalized communities. Popular speculative fiction has become increasingly interested in exploring the experiences of marginalized people and how they make their way through a world that is frequently hostile to them. Rivers Solomon, in her 2019 novella, The Deep, skilfully explores the ongoing struggle of marginalized communities to reconcile their past with their present and future. Through this exploration, this study aims to gain a deeper understanding of the ways in which postcolonialism interacts in creative narratives, particularly in speculative fantasy fiction. Set in a deep underwater society inhabited by the descendants of pregnant African women who were thrown overboard during the transatlantic slave trade, this work grapples with the lasting impact of this traumatic history on the fictional “Wajinru” community while highlighting the novel's historical context. The characters and their experiences highlight the marginalization and resistance of individuals who occupy liminal spaces, while its narrative structure disrupts dominant traditional narratives. The aim of this paper is to delve into the intricate process of identity formation within the context of generational trauma portrayed in the novella.
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Nabutanyi, Edgar. "Powerful Men and Boyhood Sexuality in K. Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents." Matatu 48, no. 1 (2016): 33–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18757421-04801004.
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In Southern African postcolonial discourses, sexual violation is often deployed as an allegory for either patriarchal control or racial domination. This perhaps explains the huge archive of narratives of sexual violence in the Southern African literary canon. While this archive and its scholarship mainly concentrates on the experiences of women and girls, a substantial number of texts portraying the sexual abuse of boys from the region demand that scholarly attention is paid to this phenomenon. Does contemporary South African fiction’s privileging of the sexual violation of boys suggest that boys are as vulnerable to this form of violence in moments of national crisis as are girls and women? Reading K. Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents1 as a portrayal of the precarious intersection of post-apartheid familial dystopia on children’s bodies—articulated through under-age prostitution—I explore how fiction intervenes successfully to spotlight the susceptibility of boys to pederasty in moments of societal crisis. Additionally, I examine how homosexual prostitution is portrayed as a tool for survival for helpless boys, on the one hand, and exhibition of patriarchal power for the men that pay to have sex with these boys, on the other. I argue that the depiction of underage sex work of some boys in South African cities can help rescue these victims from being perceived as mere statistical footnotes to Southern African inequities and patriarchal power.
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Cherop, Cathryne. "Analysing the Plight of HIV-positive Women in South African Society as Represented in Sindiwe Magona’s Beauty’s Gift." Journal of Linguistics, Literary and Communication Studies 2, no. 1 (April 3, 2023): 7–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.58721/jltcs.v2i1.175.
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Statistics show that South Africa has one of the highest rates of HIV/Aids in the world, with a prevalence of 18.9% of adults afflicted, and women much more vulnerable to the infection than men. Although anti-retrovirals are widely available, social injustices such as poverty and the low status of women contribute to this gendered disparity. In the novel Beauty’s Gift (2008), the author Sindiwe Magona relates a narrative in which four women lose their best friend to Aids, prompting them to take decisive action as women who play a significant role within the domain of the family. The Aids activist Jackie Achmat has called this novel “one of the most important books about HIV/AIDS in our country.” This article examines the fictional representation of the plight of HIV-positive women in South Africa through an analysis of the characterisation and the author’s representations of socio-cultural injustice suffered by these women. The paper further explores the advocacy and agency of these women characters during the time of sickness. With respect to stigma and discrimination, in the context of HIV and Aids, I argue that despair and hopelessness thrive in situations where women are plagued by sickness. I further argue that shame and secrecy are social conditions that perpetuate the spread of HIV, leading to a common response of silence. Lastly, the representations of bereavement and grief are analysed in this article. My examination of the agency of women characters in the chosen novel is underpinned by the theory of African feminism, which engages with, critiques, and develops Western feminism, influenced by African women’s resistance to Western hegemony and its legacy within African culture. Charged with the duties of transforming societies through both intellectual and pragmatic approaches, African feminists illuminate ways women manage and challenge multiple oppressions. Using this theoretical lens that reveals ways in which Magona elicits identification and empathy on the part of readers, which can assist in stimulating positive change as depicted in Beauty’s Gift, thus re-imagining and reconfiguring the Rainbow Nation.
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Anatol, Giselle Liza. "Getting to the Root of US Healthcare Injustices through Morrison’s Root Workers." MELUS 46, no. 4 (December 1, 2021): 186–207. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlab053.
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Abstract Although a number of scholars have tackled the figure of the Black folk-healer in Toni Morrison’s novels, the character deserves greater attention in the present moment for the insights she provides into two contemporary catastrophes: the coronavirus pandemic and the structural racism that precipitates rampant violence against brown-skinned people in the United States. Beginning with M’Dear, the elderly woman who is brought in to treat Cholly’s Aunt Jimmy in The Bluest Eye (1970), I survey descriptions of several root workers, hoodoo practitioners, and midwives in Morrison’s fiction, including Ajax’s mother in Sula (1973) and Milkman’s aunt Pilate in Song of Solomon (1977). Morrison’s portraits of these women and their communities capture the endurance of African folk customs, the undervalued knowledge of aged members of society, and a sense of Black women’s strength beyond that of the physical, laboring, or hypersexual body. The fictional experiences of Morrison’s healers also alert readers to the very real injustices that have historically impeded the successes of African Americans—and continue to hamper them, as has been exposed during the COVID-19 crisis and public outrages over police brutality. These injustices include inequities in lifelong earning potential, education, housing, and access to healthcare. Paying closer attention to the Nobel Laureate’s root-working women makes her novels more than simply “transformative” and “empowering” for individual readers; analyzing these figures allows one to unearth important critiques of medical bias and other forms of discrimination against marginalized members of society—disparities that must be dismantled in the push for social change.
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Ngeh, Andrew T., and Sarah M. Nalova. "Rethinking Language and Gender in African Fiction: Towards De-gendering and Re-gendering." Social Science, Humanities and Sustainability Research 1, no. 1 (June 20, 2020): p132. http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/sshsr.v1n1p132.
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The recognition and acceptance of the social construction of gender and the coercive nature of gendered subjectivities has been at the centre of feminist discourse which challenges the subjugation of the woman. G.D. Nyamndi, therefore, in his Facing Meamba attempts to address these concerns and proffer feasible solutions. The representation of women in literature, the role of gender in both literary creation and literary criticism, as studied ingynocriticism, the connection between gender and various aspects of literary form in such genre and metre embody masculine values of heroism, war, and adventure. This androcentric stand has compromised the rights of the woman, resulting in her marginalization, alienation and exclusion from socio-cultural activities. She is maligned with a sense of inadequacy. The patriarchal centre prevails and dominates the woman who has been pushed to the margin of the society. In this regard, Nyamndi demonstrates that, the African woman still has a place within the postcolonial context even though the man is imbued with more powers than the woman. Informed by the postcolonial theory, this study argues that, gendering constitutes a grave danger to a harmonious existence between the two genders. The study revealed that, de-gendering and re-gendering can create harmony between the man and woman because the two concepts are basis for gender equality. To achieve this, language which constitutes a semiotic mould has been exploited to deploy themes like, gender inequality and cultural issues.
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Cherop, Cathryne. "Analysing the Plight of HIV-positive Women in South African Society as Represented in Sindiwe Magona’s Beauty’s Gift." Journal of Linguistics, Literary and Communication Studies 2, no. 1 (March 20, 2023): xx. http://dx.doi.org/10.58721/jltcs.v2i1.176.
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This article proceeds from the understanding that literature is the mirror of society, reflecting problematic features, failures to provide social justice, and attempts to live with dignity and hope. Statistics show that South Africa has one of the highest rates of HIV/Aids in the world, with a prevalence of 18.9% of adults afflicted, and women much more vulnerable to the infection than men. Although anti-retrovirals are widely available, social injustices such as poverty and the low status of women contribute to this gendered disparity. In the novel Beauty’s Gift (2008), author Sindiwe Magona relates a narrative in which four women lose their best friend to Aids, prompting them to take decisive action as women who play a significant role within the domain of the family. The Aids activist Zackie Achmat has called this novel “one of the most important books about HIV/AIDS in our country.” This article examines the fictional representation of the plight of HIV-positive women in South Africa through an analysis of the characterisation and the author’s representations of socio-cultural injustice suffered by these women. The paper further explores the advocacy and agency of these women characters during the time of sickness. With respect to stigma and discrimination, in the context of HIV and Aids, I argue that despair and hopelessness thrive in situations where women are plagued by sickness. I further argue that shame and secrecy are social conditions that perpetuate the spread of HIV, leading to a common response of silence. Lastly, the representations of bereavement and grief are analysed in this article. My examination of the agency of women characters in the chosen novel is underpinned by the theory of African feminism, which engages with, critiques and develops Western feminism, influenced by African women’s resistance to Western hegemony and its legacy within African culture. Charged with the duties of transforming societies through both intellectual and pragmatic approaches, African feminists illuminate ways women manage and challenge multiple oppressions. Using this theoretical lens enables me to reveal ways in which Magona elicits identification and empathy on the part of readers, which can assist in stimulating positive change as depicted in Beauty’s Gift, thus re-imagining and reconfiguring the Rainbow Nation.
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Caraivan, Luiza. "Portraits of South African Women in Lauren Beukes’ Writings." Gender Studies 15, no. 1 (December 1, 2016): 214–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/genst-2017-0014.
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Abstract The aim of this paper is to study some of Lauren Beukes’ feminine characters and to draw a parallel between them and some famous South African personalities presented in her non-fiction work Maverick: Extraordinary Women from South Africa’s Past. To this end, I will analyse three of her novels, Moxyland (2008), Zoo City (2010) and The Shining Girls (2012), in order to draw attention to the part played by South African women in Apartheid and post-Apartheid society.
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Chakravarty, Prerana. "Dangerous Femininity: Looking into the Portrayal of Daphne Monet as a Femme Fatale in Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress." IAFOR Journal of Arts & Humanities 9, no. 1 (July 29, 2022): 62–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.22492/ijah.9.1.05.
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The phrase “femme fatale” is a well-known figure in the literary and cultural representations of women. Associated with evil temptation, the femme fatale is an iconic figure that has been appropriated into folklore, literature, and mythology. In the twentieth century, the figure finds space in literary and cinematic endeavours, particularly in crime fiction and noir thrillers. The progenitors of the hard-boiled genre of detective fiction popularised the figure of a sexually seductive and promiscuous woman who betrays men for material gain. Walter Mosley, an African American detective fiction writer, adapted the hard-boiled formula popularised by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, but altered it to address socio-political issues concerning the condition of African Americans in the post-World War II era. Mosley followed Chandler’s lead in weaving a quest narrative around femme fatale Daphne Monet in his first novel, Devil in a Blue Dress (1990). The purpose of this paper is to look at Mosley’s treatment of the femme fatale figure in this novel. The methodology employed is a close analysis of the text, as well as an analysis of the figure of the femme fatale in its function as catalyst for men’s behaviour. The purpose of this study is to examine how the femme fatale was created, specifically what elements contributed to Daphne Monet’s transformation into a femme fatale.
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Menang PhD, Ophilia Abianji. "The Modern African Woman and the Politics of Reconciling Career and Domestic Activities." International Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities Invention 6, no. 4 (April 15, 2019): 5384–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.18535/ijsshi/v6i4.03.
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In early African male fiction, women were not allowed to go to school. They were pushed to the periphery where they occupied marginal spaces. They had no voice in public. They were expected to perform household duties concerning childbearing and domestic functions. These are roles that domesticated women and made them dependent on their husbands for survival. However, urbanization and the spread of female education has given women more space and opportunities for survival and livelihood. In addition to culturally assigned roles, women are now educated and have acquired skills which enable them to have paid jobs and pursue a career in different walks of life thereby rendering them economically empowered and making positive contributions to the growth of their communities and families. This blend of domestic activities and pursuing a career is not without its own challenges. This article aims at examining the politics of reconciling career and domestic activities through the prism of Alobwed’Epie’s Patching the Broken Dream. It looks at the challenges that women/widows go through as wives, mothers and being career women. It reveals how the woman/widow rises above these challenges and reconstructs her image. Informed by the womanist ideology of Micere Mugo, E Modupe Kolawole and Chikwenye Ogunyemi, this paper justifies the view that domestic activities and career in the novel under study is challenging for women especially widows. However, these challenges do not limit the woman. They make her strong and develop hidden potentials that change their perception about life and people’s view about women and widows.
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Cucarella-Ramon, Vicent. "The black female slave takes literary revenge: Female gothic motifs against slavery in Hannah Crafts’s "The Bondwoman’s Narrative"." Journal of English Studies 13 (December 15, 2015): 19. http://dx.doi.org/10.18172/jes.2786.
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The Bondwoman’s Narrative is a novel that functions as a story made up from Hannah Crafts’s experiences as a bondwoman and thus merges fact and fiction giving a thoroughly new account of slavery both committed to reality and fiction. Following and taking over the Gothic literary genre that spread in Europe as a reaction toward the Romantic spirit, Crafts uses it to denounce the degrading slavery system and, mainly, to scathingly attack the patriarchal roots that stigmatize black women as the ultimate victims. It is my contention that Hannah Crafts uses the female Gothic literary devices both to attack slavery and also to stand as a proper (African) American citizen capable of relating to the cultural outlets that American culture offered aiming to counteract the derogatory stereotypes that rendered African American women at the very bottom of the social ladder.
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Ovie-Jack, Matilda Eyituoyo. "Female voice and space in Fred Agbeyegbe’s The King Must Dance Naked and Woe unto Death." Tropical Journal of Arts and Humanities 4, no. 2 (2022): 49–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.47524/tjah.v4i2.50.
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This paper is to examine the fictional expression of female voice and space as a powerful feminist mode of resistance against patriarchy, while examining such terms as feminism, womanism, voice and space as they relate to female expression of self-identity. Womanism is applied in the African context to explore the social cultural setting and female struggles in Fred Agbeyegbe‟s The King Must Dance Naked and Woe Unto Death. This paper addresses issues like discrimination, stereotyping, patriarchy, oppression, and sexual rights. This study will also make known the positive transformation of the woman‟s voice and space, such that women are not marginalized but are treated equally in all spheres of life. The African woman, like most women out there can be a full time house wife and also cope with her social and political lifestyle. The study concludes that the female personnel in the two plays under investigation are those who are able to disregard and rise above patriarchy in the African cultural space.
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Sachs, Carolyn. "Loosening the Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm Women, 1750-1850. Joan JensenPrairie Women: Images in American and Canadian Fiction. Carol FairbanksPlains Woman: The Diary of Martha Farnsworth, 1882-1922. Marlene Springer , Haskell Springer , Martha FarnsworthFarm Women: Work, Farm and Family in the United States. Rachel RosenfeldOpen Country, Iowa: Rural Women, Tradition and Change. Deborah FinkYou May Plow Here: The Narrative of Sara Brooks. Thordis Simonsen , Sara BrooksWomen Farmers in Africa: Rural Development in Mali and the Sahel. Lucy E. Creevey." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14, no. 2 (January 1989): 510–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/494520.
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Edith, Nabasa, Ainembabazi Earnest B, Gideon Too Kiplagat, Nantale Hadijja, and Niwagaba Tarcis. "A Feminist Critique of Women Portrayal in NGUGI WA THIONGO’S Devil on the Cross." INOSR ARTS AND HUMANITIES 10, no. 1 (May 29, 2024): 1–8. http://dx.doi.org/10.59298/inosrah/2024/101.1801.
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African American Literature demonstrates that the Black Women's Feminism Caucus acknowledged that black women faced a dual patriarchal oppression from within their own community and from white society. This paper examines how Devil on the Cross portrays a Kikuyu woman striving for liberation and transformative change in Kenyan society. Employing a feminist perspective, the researcher contends that Ngugi Wa Thiong'o illustrates the plight of women in Kenyan society, interpreting feminism within its cultural framework. Building on this foundation, the study advocates for the designation of essential services such as police protection, justice, shelters, helplines, and community support services, ensuring they receive adequate support and resources to operate during pandemics and other public emergencies affecting women and girls. It emphasizes the necessity of involving women and women's civil society organizations in policy formulation, development, and implementation to integrate their knowledge, experiences, and needs into response strategies. Furthermore, it stresses the importance of prioritizing prevention and protection against gender-based and domestic violence in national responses by collecting detailed data on the prevalence of such violence and identifying which demographics of women and girls are most vulnerable. Keywords: Domestic violence, Feminist critique, Fiction, Women emancipation, Women portrayal
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Rege, Josna E. "Gender Voices and Choices: Redefining Women in Contemporary African Fiction (review)." Research in African Literatures 31, no. 3 (2000): 209–10. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ral.2000.0096.
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Mengel, Ewald. "The Contemporary South African Trauma Novel: Michiel Heyns’ Lost Ground (2011) and Marlene van Niekerk’s The Way of the Women (2008)." Anglia 138, no. 1 (March 4, 2020): 144–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ang-2020-0007.
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AbstractAfter the end of apartheid in 1990 and the new constitution of 1994, the genre of the contemporary South African novel is experiencing a heyday. One reason for this is that, with the end of censorship, the authors can go about unrestraint to take a critical look at the traumatized country and the state of a nation that shows a great need to come to terms with its past. In this context, trauma and narration prove to be a fertile combination, an observation that stands in marked contrast to the deconstructionist view of trauma as ‘unclaimed’ experience and the inability to speak about it. Michiel Heyns’ Lost Ground (2011) and Marlene van Niekerk’s The Way of the Women (2008) are prime examples of the contemporary South African trauma novel. As crime fiction, Lost Ground not only tells a thrilling story but is also deeply involved in South African politics. The novelist Heyns plays with postmodernist structures, but the real strength of the novel lies in its realistic milieu description and the analysis of the protagonist’s traumatic ‘entanglements’. The Way of the Women is mainly a farm novel but also shows elements of the historical novel and the marriage novel. It continues the process of the deconstruction of the farm as a former symbol of the Afrikaner’s pride and glory. Both novels’ meta-fictional self-reflections betray the self-consciousness of their authors who are aware of the symbolization compulsions in a traumatized country. They use narrative as a means of ‘working through’, coming to terms with trauma, and achieving reconciliation. Both novels’ complex narrative structures may be read as symbolic expressions of traumatic ‘entanglements’ that lie at the heart of the South African dilemma.
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Nishikawa, Kinohi. "Driven by the Market: African American Literature after Urban Fiction." American Literary History 33, no. 2 (May 1, 2021): 320–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajab008.
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Abstract Kenneth W. Warren’s What Was African American Literature? (2011) compelled literary historians to question deeply held assumptions about periodization and racial authorship. While critics have taken issue with Warren aligning African American literature with Jim Crow segregation, none has examined his account of what came after this conjuncture: namely, the market’s wholesale cooptation of Black writing. By following the career of African American popular novelist Omar Tyree, this essay shows how corporate publishers in the 1990s and 2000s redefined African American literature as a sales category, one that combined a steady stream of recognized authors with a mad dash for amateur talent. Tyree had been part of the first wave of self-published authors to be picked up by major New York houses. However, as soon as he was made to conform to the industry’s demands, Tyree was eclipsed by Black women writers who developed the hard-boiled romance genre known as urban fiction. As Tyree saw his literary fortunes fade, corporate publishing became increasingly reliant on Black book entrepreneurs to sustain the category of African American literature, thereby turning racial authorship into a vehicle for realizing profits.
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Griffiths, Claire H. "AFRICAN WOMEN WRITERS : CONFIGURING CHANGE AT THE INTERFACE OF POLITICS AND FICTION." RELIEF - REVUE ÉLECTRONIQUE DE LITTÉRATURE FRANÇAISE 5, no. 1 (November 9, 2011): 1. http://dx.doi.org/10.18352/relief.651.
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P. B. Rodrigues, Isabel, and Kathleen Sheldon. "Cape Verdean and Mozambican Women's Literature: Liberating the National and Seizing the Intimate." African Studies Review 53, no. 3 (December 2010): 77–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0002020600005680.
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Abstract:In Mozambique and Cape Verde, writing in Portuguese by African women has directly engaged political reconstruction by denouncing colonial oppression and embracing national freedom. This article addresses the recent history of Lusophone African women's fiction, which has been pivotal in inscribing the intimate arena of sexuality and motherhood into power relations and has also revealed ways in which the domain of violence intersects with private lives. By focusing on two novels that exemplify this trend, this article demonstrates links between the political and the intimate. It also shows how Lusophone African authors contribute to healing social conflict through their narratives, and draws some conclusions about gender relations in the Lusophone African experience and across the continent.
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García Morgado, Mónica. "Colorism, Passing for White, and Intertextuality in Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half: Rewriting African American Women's Literary Tradition." Babel – AFIAL : Aspectos de Filoloxía Inglesa e Alemá, no. 31 (December 16, 2022): 73–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.35869/afial.v0i31.4298.
Full textAbstract:
This article draws on various theories and studies about the color line, colorism, and racial passing in African American culture, history, and literature to examine the themes of colorism and passing for white in Brit Bennett’s 2020 novel The Vanishing Half. This article juxtaposes Bennett’s novel alongside earlier works written by twentieth-century African American women writers, underscoring Bennett’s intertextual influences, which include Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), and God Help the Child (2015). As Bennett revises and incorporates earlier novels into her own, she redeems tragic female characters such as Pecola Breedlove and Clare Kendry, highlights the persistence and damage of colorism, updates the passing narrative, and defies stereotypes about Black women. It concludes that in The Vanishing Half, Bennett proposes a fresh path for twenty-first-century African American fiction through the themes of colorism and passing for white in her rewriting of African American women’s literary tradition.
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Garrido, Felipe Espinoza. "‘Ingratitude! Treachery! Revenge!’: Race, Empire, and Mutinous Femininities in Harriette Gordon Smythies’ A Faithful Woman (1865)." Victoriographies 12, no. 3 (November 2022): 243–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/vic.2022.0469.
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Harriette Gordon Smythies’ overlooked sensation novel A Faithful Woman (1865) engages with two cultural formations instrumental in shaping the Victorians’ representations of race, and to a large degree, also their understanding of it: The Indian Rebellion of 1857 and minstrelsy. As its various symbolic appropriations of mutinous women show, the novel is highly critical of the easy and essentialising recriminations of ‘vile’ Indianness and offers a keen appreciation of the parallels between the Empire’s racialising oppressions abroad and its gendered oppressions at home. At the same time, however, its representations of African American characters seek to enshrine Britain’s moral superiority vis-à-vis the United States’ slavery system. Particularly, A Faithful Woman’s examinations of racialised imaginations of Indian Britons and African Americans – contrasting, for instance, British sculpture and portraiture with (allegedly) American minstrelsy – speak to its attempt to dissociate the practices of Empire from its former colonies across the Atlantic. Its critical examination of imperial notions of race in post-Rebellion sensation fiction, this article argues, helps to reaffirm the very colonial practices that it seeks to undermine.
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Salih, Suadah Jasim, and Lajiman Janoory. "The Voice of the Black Female Other: A Post-Colonial Feminist Perspective in J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron." Malaysian Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities (MJSSH) 5, no. 10 (October 2, 2020): 267–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.47405/mjssh.v5i10.524.
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As a beacon in a storm, John Maxwell Coetzee has established himself through his intellectual contribution to the post-colonial feminism literature in general and South African slavery epoch in particular. Accordingly, this study has been devoted to critically reflect how Coetzee confined his pen to support the oppressed black South Africans against injustice, oppression and deprivation. Moreover, the paper reveals the South African inextricable components and haw the writer has deeply perceived both apartheid and post-apartheid history by his naked eyes. Coetzee’s Age of Iron reveals his unique ability to aptly penetrate his readers based on contradiction where pessimism is shifted to optimism and, therefore, the readers’ mindset is directly shifted from atrocity to love. The study then delves deeply to show how Coetzee provides a solution to bring two parted races, black and white South Africans, together through the role of women characters in his fiction based on both gender and racial schism. Specifically, this study critically scrutinizes Coetzee’s Age of Iron. The study applies the post-colonial feminism theory using discursive strategy based on sociological and anthropological analyses to reveal how colonization destroyed South Africans’ cultures resulting in a crisis of human segregation which is depicted through white women characters in the novel. By drawing the post-colonial black women’s treatment by the colonisers and the forms of resisting their hegemony, the findings of this study are expected to significantly contribute to the researchers whose concern is on black women in Coetzee’s fiction.
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Weston, Natasha Lyle. "Whose city? (De)colonising the bodies of speculative fiction in Lauren Beukes's Zoo City." Image & Text, no. 37 (November 1, 2023): 1–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2617-3255/2023/n37a34.
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This article explores the (de)colonisation of the body and body boundaries in contemporary South African speculative fiction, paying particular attention to award-wining author, Lauren Beukes's, second novel, Zoo City (2010). I will apply Lara Cox's (2018:317) argument that 'Haraway's cyborg resembles the liminal view of identity presented by queer theory, which seeks to blur strict divisions between sexual and gender categories, dissolving binary oppositions such as woman/man and heterosexual/homosexual', to my reading of Zoo City. By centring the novel around Zinzi December, a resident of 'Zoo City' (the marginalised underbelly of Johannesburg), and situating the novel in the cradle of humankind, Beukes reacts against South Africa's colonial history and its colonisation of the body by blurring the animal-human boundary and challenging the colonial construct of body binaries. The novel can be read as a decolonial feminist text as it re-writes South Africa's apartheid history and critiques its division, separation and bodily segregation. Furthermore, I explore how fictional bodies are imagined and constructed in the text; I ask what kinds of boundary-breaking bodies predominate; and consider their thematic, narrative, and political significance in the postapartheid imaginary in relation to speculative fiction. I examine how new boundaries (particularly between 'normative' society and 'Zoo City') are formulated. Zoo City pulls into focus Kristeva's (1982) notion of the abject body as a central to its concerns, while also bringing attention to Foucault's (1992) notion of the 'disciplined' body. It foregrounds questions about the formulation and destabilisation of identity, with a particular focus on the construction of female identity. This article builds on the critical literature on the dystopian post-apartheid state by examining Zoo City's depictions of marginalised people and its construction of the body and body boundaries, as well as by extending the examination of representations of the body in speculative fiction.
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Friday, Akporherhe, Udi Peter Oghenerioborue, and Esemedafe Emmanuel. "Folk Medical Practices and Treatments in African Fiction." Health Economics and Management Review 3, no. 4 (2022): 92–104. http://dx.doi.org/10.21272/hem.2022.4-10.
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This paper examines the enactment of cultural medical practices in the narratives of African writers. It aims at promoting the application of folk medicines in addressing the health problems of patients as enacted in artistic productions of fiction writers. It will celebrate, propagate and preserve these approaches to preventive and curative medical practices, which are indigenous to the African people. The study will be beneficial to health caregivers, researchers, health educators, health agencies and policy formulators, who are determined to promote the cultural healthcare system in society. It will reawaken and strengthen medical practitioners, patients and researchers, who may which to apply folk medical practices as an alternative treatment for health problems in socio-cultural settings. This research is field survey and library-based, with the literary texts carefully and purposively selected according to their thematic thrust and qualitatively analysed. Oral interviews were conducted to gather first-hand information and data on traditional medical practices from respondents, who have profound knowledge of the topic. The respondents were elderly men and women with profound knowledge of traditional medical practices, and they were drawn from various Urhobo communities, such as Ughelli, Akperhe-Olomu, Orogun, Okparabe, Edjekota-Ogor, and Agbarha-Otor. Among those interviewed were traditional medical practitioners, diviners, and patients, who often apply trado-medicines as alternative and supplementary treatments. Apart from the primary materials, scholarly works that are relevant to the current study were also consulted by the researchers. Findings showed that African societies are endowed with diverse forms of folk medicine, including the use of herbs, hydrotherapy, heat therapy, use of ointments, hot food as an intervention, talk therapy, etc. The study concluded that African writers are conscious of the utilitarian functions of their indigenous healthcare interventions, and so they integrate some of the practices into their artistic works, not only for the documentation but also to activate the awareness of readers on the efficacy of the traditional medicines. The various folk medical practices can serve as alternative and complementary treatments for people who cannot afford western healthcare interventions in contemporary societies.