Browsing by Author "Chisoko, Shilika"

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    Gender and violence in representations of female characters in selected contemporary short fiction by Zambian women writers
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2024-03) Chisoko, Shilika; Murray, Sally-Ann, 1961-; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The selected short stories in this thesis offer imaginative treatments of the daily lives of women in Zambia, lives characterised by gender discrimination and difficulties associated with living in a patriarchal society. The thesis argues that the representations of female characters in the examples of contemporary short fiction by Zambian women constitute important forms of knowledge through which to understand the complexity of Zambian women’s engagement with patriarchy. Here, I draw on Ranka Primorac’s comments on short fiction by earlier female Zambian writers. Primorac identifies a tendency, in the stories she analyses, to provide accounts of the difficulties associated with living in a postcolonial society by depicting female characters experiencing the challenges of everyday life. My own study furthers Primorac’s claims by suggesting that the representation of female characters in much current short fiction by Zambian women begins to offer a feminist-inflected critique of Zambian society via dissenting portrayals of the violence experienced by female characters. The word violence is used in this thesis to describe the gendered and sexual discrimination experienced by the female characters, and I draw on the ideas of Pumla Dineo Gqola, Johan Galtung and Slavoj Žižek (among others) to argue that the varied kinds of discrimination experienced by the female characters in the stories emanates from patriarchal regimes of power and violence, which in my argument means that such discrimination is itself a form of violence. In my analysis of the depictions if violence in various examples of short fiction, I position the stories as illocutionary forces which, according to Maria Pia Lara’s theorisation of the illocutionary capabilities of feminist narratives in the public sphere, have an unsettling revelatory capacity that embodies a transformative socio-textual potential in the development of emergent Zambian feminist epistemes. (In exploring the possibilities of emergent feminisms in short fiction from Zambia, my study also points to the fact that in the last two decades there has been an increase in the production of short fiction by Zambian women, and indicates that this increase is partly due to literary awards such as the Kalemba Short Story Prize, which is awarded to short fiction by Zambians. The majority of shortlisted stories are female-authored, and all the winners are women.