Doctoral Degrees (English)

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Browsing Doctoral Degrees (English) by Subject "African diaspora in literature"

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    The city that billows smoke : a spatial reading of Bulawayo in prose fiction
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2024-03) Dube, Nhlanhla; Jones, Megan; Bangeni, Nwabisa; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: My study investigates the ways in which Zimbabwe’s second city, Bulawayo, is represented on the page. By reading fiction authored during the ‘lost decade’, I explore images of the city which emanate from novels and short stories from writers in Zimbabwe and abroad. I answer the question, what argument about place is being made when a character is in a particular locale? Theoretically, I deploy Geocriticism in order to show that space is made up of places. This is done by reading sections of the literary city such as the suburb, the Location and the diasporan constituency as parts of a larger whole. The fact that all narratives have to happen somewhere is at the core of the idea that the geographical location ‘where’ narratives occur, is more than just background setting and aesthetic. My exploration of the literary suburb is concerned with concepts of belonging and the racial aspects of city space. I show the importance of walking the suburb and the significance the process of losing home has in defining the 21st century suburb. Through studying the Location, I privilege the importance of places of drink and construction activities in high density living areas, to show how they indicate a spirit of place. To add to this, I also account for the diasporan view in order to see how the idea of the literary city is complicated by the act of diasporic return. Diasporic return unearths versions of the city that exist outside national borders and it highlights that Bulawayo is in conversation with other cities. My project demonstrates the existence of a Bulawayo literary city which has intricate local political realities and socio-economic conditions. This thesis also establishes that readings of the city have to take into account history, politics and geography in order to gauge the conditions under which unique literary cities are formed.
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    Intra- and inter-continental migrations and diaspora in contemporary African fiction
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013-03) Moudouma Moudouma, Sydoine; Steiner, Tina; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The focus of this dissertation is the examination of the relationship between space and identity in recent narratives of migration, in contemporary African literature. Migrant narratives suggest that there is a correlation between identity formation and the types of boundaries and borders migrants engage with in their various attempts to find new homes away from their old ones. Be it voluntary or involuntary, the process of migrating from a familial place transforms the individual who has to negotiate new social formations; and tensions often accrue from the confrontation between one’s culture and the culture of the receiving society. Return migration to the supposed country of origin is an equally important trajectory dealt with in African migrant literature. The reverse narrative stipulates similar tensions between one’s diasporic culture – the culture of the diasporic space – and the culture of the homeland. Thus, intra- and inter-continental migrations and diaspora is a bifurcated inquiry that examines both outward and return migrations. These movements reveal the ways in which Africans make sense of their Africanity and their place in the world. The concepts of “border”, “boundary” and “borderland” are useful to examine notions of difference and separation both within the nation-state and in relation to transnational, intra-African as well as inter-continental exchanges. I focus more fully on these notions in the texts that examine migrations within Africa, both outward and return movements. This study is not only interested in the physical features of borders, boundaries or borderlands, but also on their consequences for the processes of identity formation and translation, and how they can help to reveal the social and historical characteristics of diasporic formations. What undergirds much of the analysis is the assumption that the negotiation of belonging and space cannot be separated from the crossing or breaching of borders and boundaries; and that these negotiations entail attempts to enter the borderland, which is a zone of exchange, crisscrossing networks, dissolution of notions of singularity and exclusive identities.
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    Myth and counterfactuality in diasporic African women’s novels
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2022-03) Kwanya, Joseph Michael Amolo; Green, Louise; Sanger, Nadia; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This dissertation focuses on the way in which a selection of novels by diasporic African women writers has, in different ways, engaged with myth in order to challenge dominant masculinist and essentialist narratives about women’s roles in African society. These authors either draw on traditional myths, challenge the mythologising function of nationalist histories or generate new forms of myths for the future. Although these novels are not counterfactual in the conventional sense–they do not change the outcomes of history–I argue that counterfactual theory offers a valuable way of analysing them. Each of the authors takes facts, historical figures, known histories, and myths, and reworks them in different ways, creating new versions of events where women play key roles. I demonstrate that analysing these texts as counterfactuals allows us to tease out how these authors challenge the androcentric notions of gender in myth and history by focusing their imagination on the silenced, elided, and undermined stories of African women. My reading of Jennifer Makumbi’s Kintu (2014) and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016) explores how using myth to unsettle history and history to unsettle myth uncovers complex stories of African women. Wartime novels such as Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King (2019) and Nadifa Mohamed’s The Orchard of Lost Souls (2013) focus on the mythologising function of nationalist histories in which certain stories are elevated to a position of dominance and others are suppressed or ignored. Whether constructed by the author or simulated by female characters, counterfactuals in the two novels construct worlds where women’s roles and experiences during wars are revealed. My analysis of Jordan Ifueko’s Raybearer (2020) and Nnedi Okorafor’s two novels, The Book of Phoenix (2015) and Who Fears Death (2010), explores the genre of speculative fiction as a flexible space for experimenting with the counterfactual framework in telling African women’s stories through new forms of myths. The analysis shows that while narratives such as myth and history seem fixed and controlling, counterfactuals are valuable tools for unsettling their dominance.
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    Precarious unmoorings : women’s voices in the Anglo- and Lusophone literature of Adichie, Chiziane and Mohamed
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2023-03) Lim, Rose Joanna; Steiner, Tina; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH SUMMARY : African women’s writing has firmly established itself in the arena of postcolonial literatures. It has long walked on from the clamour of the great African language debate on the use of Europhone versus Afrophone languages in African fiction. This dissertation studies the enigma of unmoored African women’s articulations from the perspectives of narratives written in Anglo- and Lusophone mediums. Unmoored, ‘orphaned’ women’s language has taken on a life of its own and disengaged from its colonial-era Europhone sensibilities. It has unobtrusively established unmistakable footholds in the realms of African literature. I argue that the women-centric unmoored language in the narratives of African women writers exist within the ambits of culture and society and yet demonstrate vagabond tendency to wander and engage with further potentialities of articulation. My dissertation examines selected novels from the literary repertoires of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Paulina Chiziane and Nadifa Mohamed respectively. The main impetus for my study is to engage with the phenomenon of unmoored African women’s writing and the manner in which the narratives reflect and create registers in which the experience of women takes centre stage. In particular, attention is drawn to the multivalent articulations of the texts’ women protagonists and other supporting characters, and the routes through which they subversively express themselves in hostile patriarchal settings. The core chapters of this dissertation identify three main strands of such women-centric unmoored articulations, namely the role of imposed and strategic silence in Adichie’s narratives, a reliance on collective expression in Chiziane’s work and geo-poetic spatial contemplations in Mohamed’s texts. The variegated nuances of these different narrative features draw out the diverging approaches to articulation in selected narratives of these three African writers. Writing from Lusophone Africa, Chiziane offers an additional contrast to the Afro-Anglo-perspectives of Adichie and Mohamed. My dissertation contends that these women-centred narratives amplify the heterogenous stances of African women, whose voices do not conform to societies’ prevailing tenets.