The Politics Of Mothering: Womanhood, Identity, and Resistance in African Literature

by Nnaemeka, O.

• ISBN13: 9780415137898
• ISBN10: 0415137896
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781134774388
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1997-01-06
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

A feminist study that interrogates feminist theorizing,The Politics of (M)Otheringcalls into question the validity of the traditional/modern prototype in analysis of African Literature. This volume examines the many faces of "Mother" in African works--motherland, mother tongue, motherwit, motherhood, mothering--that expose the paradoxical location of (m)other as both a central and peripheral "other". On many levels, the essays in this volume problematize the issue of "victim" as it is articulated by a feminist voice. Though this volume stands as a feminist analysis of African Literature, it engages in feminist theory itself by demonstrating how issues in feminism such as voice, agency, victimhood, subjectivity, choice, sisterhood and motherhood are recast in different ways.

Table of Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Imag(in)ing Knowledge, Power, and Subversion in the Margins

Mother's Talk Charles Sugnet Nervous Conditions: Dangarembga's Feminist Reinvention of Fanon

Traor'e Why the Snake-Lizard Killed His Mother: Inscribing and Decentering "Nneka" in Things Fall Apart

The Eye and the Other: The Gaze and the Look in Egyptian Feminist Fiction

Enlightenment Epistemology and "Aesthetic Cognition": Mariama B^a's So Long a Letter

Nfah-Abbenyi Calixthe Beyala's "femme-fillette": Womanhood and the Politics of (M)Othering Cynthia Ward Bound to Matter: The Father's Pen and Mother Tongues

Mother Tongues and Childless Women: The Construction of "Kenyan" "Womanhood" Huma Ibrahim Ontological Victimhood: "Other Bodies in Madness and Exile"

Toward a Third World Feminist Epistemology

Urban Spaces, Woman's Places: Polygamy as Sign in Mariama B^a's Novels Ren'ee Larrier Reconstructing Motherhood: Francophone

African Women Autobiographers Fran,coise Lionnet Geographies of Pain: Captive Bodies and Violent Acts in the fictions of Gayl Jones

Bessie Head and Myriam Warner-Vieyra

Contributors

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