Gender in African Women s Writing

Gender in African Women s Writing
Author: Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi
Publsiher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 1997-12-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0253211492

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"This is a cogent analysis of the complexities of gender in the work of nine contemporary Anglophone and Francophone novelists. . . . offers illuminating interpretations of worthy writers . . . " —Multicultural Review "This book reaffirms Bessie Head's remark that books are a tool, in this case a tool that allows readers to understand better the rich lives and the condition of African women. Excellent notes and a rich bibliography." —Choice ". . . a college-level analysis which will appeal to any interested in African studies and literature." —The Bookwatch This book applies gender as a category of analysis to the works of nine sub-Saharan women writers: Aidoo, Bá, Beyala, Dangarembga, Emecheta, Head, Liking, Tlali, and Zanga Tsogo. The author appropriates western feminist theories of gender in an African literary context, and in the process, she finds and names critical theory that is African, indigenous, self-determining, which she then melds with western feminist theory and comes out with an over-arching theory that enriches western, post-colonial and African critical perspectives.

Writing African Women

Writing African Women
Author: Stephanie Newell
Publsiher: Zed Books Ltd.
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2017-06-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9781786990075

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How does our understanding of Africa shift when we begin from the perspective of women? What can the African perspective offer theories of culture and of gender difference? This work, as unique and insightful today as when it was first published, brings together a wide variety of African academics and other researchers to explore the links between literature, popular culture and theories of gender. Beginning with a ground-breaking overview of African gender theory, the book goes on to analyse women's writing, uncovering the ways different writers have approached issues of female creativity and colonial history, as well as the ways in which they have subverted popular stereotypes around African women. The contributors also explore the related gender dynamics of mask performance and oral story-telling. This major analysis of gender in popular and postcolonial cultural production remains essential reading for students and academics in women's studies, cultural studies and literature.

African Women Writers and the Politics of Gender

African Women Writers and the Politics of Gender
Author: Sadia Zulfiqar
Publsiher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2016-09-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9781443812771

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This work 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 book is three-fold. 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.

New Women s Writing in African Literature

New Women s Writing in African Literature
Author: Ernest Emenyo̲nu
Publsiher: Africa Research and Publications
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2004
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: UOM:39015061326016

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African women writers have come a long way from the 1960s when they were hardly noticed as serious writers. Since the 1960s, female writing in Africa has been steadily rising in quantity and quality. This work shows how their literature is redefining images of womanhood.

Gender in African Women s Writing

Gender in African Women s Writing
Author: Juliana Sam-Abbenyi
Publsiher: National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada
Total Pages: 297
Release: 1993
Genre: African literature
ISBN: 031594711X

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"This thesis offers a feminist analysis of women and gender in the novels of Buchi Emecheta, Ama Ata Aidoo, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Delphine Zanga Tsogo, Calixthe Beyala, Werewere Liking, Mariama Ba, Miriam Tlali and Bessie Head. My analyses appropriate and rethink western feminist theories of gender and post-colonial literary theory. I maintain that the texts analyzed are also theoretical, since feminist theory is embedded in the polysemy of the texts themselves. The study demonstrates that identity and sexuality are not static sites of oppression for women. They are contesting terrains where the subversion of difference, and the construction of identity, subjectivity and sexuality, are interlocking issues. Women's positional perspectives and varying subject positions are shown to be their strengths." --

Post Colonial and African American Women s Writing

Post Colonial and African American Women s Writing
Author: Gina Wisker
Publsiher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2017-03-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780333985243

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This accessible and unusually wide-ranging book is essential reading for anyone interested in postcolonial and African American women's writing. It provides a valuable gender and culture inflected critical introduction to well established women writers: Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Margaret Atwood, Suniti Namjoshi, Bessie Head, and others from the U.S.A., India, Africa, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and introduces emergent writers from South East Asia, Cyprus and Oceania. Engaging with and clarifying contested critical areas of feminism and the postcolonial; exploring historical background and cultural context, economic, political, and psychoanalytic influences on gendered experience, it provides a cohesive discussion of key issues such as cultural and gendered identity, motherhood, mothertongue, language, relationships, women's economic constraints and sexual politics.

Black Women Writing and Identity

Black Women  Writing and Identity
Author: Carole Boyce-Davies
Publsiher: Routledge
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2002-09-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781134855230

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Black Women Writing and Identity is an exciting work by one of the most imaginative and acute writers around. The book explores a complex and fascinating set of interrelated issues, establishing the significance of such wide-ranging subjects as: * re-mapping, re-naming and cultural crossings * tourist ideologies and playful world travelling * gender, heritage and identity * African women's writing and resistance to domination * marginality, effacement and decentering * gender, language and the politics of location Carole Boyce-Davies is at the forefront of attempts to broaden the discourse surrounding the representation of and by black women and women of colour. Black Women Writing and Identity represents an extraordinary achievement in this field, taking our understanding of identity, location and representation to new levels.

Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender

Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender
Author: Florence Stratton
Publsiher: Routledge
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2020-09-23
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9781000158779

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The influence of colonialism and race on the development of African literature has been the subject of a number of studies. The effect of patriarchy and gender, however, and indeed the contributions of African women, have up until now been largely ignored by the critics. Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender is the first extensive account of African literature from a feminist perspective. In this first radical and exciting work Florence Stratton outlines the features of an emerging female tradition in African fiction. A chapter is dedicated to each to the works of four women writers: Grace Ogot, Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta and Mariama Ba. In addition she provides challenging new readings of canonical male authors such as Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiongo'o and Wole Soyinka. Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender thus provides the first truly comprehensive definition of the current literary tradition in Africa.