Doctoral Degrees (English)

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Browsing Doctoral Degrees (English) by Subject "African fiction (English) -- History and criticism"

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    Contemporary fictional representations of sexualities from authoritarian African contexts
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2016-12) Mtenje, Asante Lucy; Murray, Sally-Ann; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In this dissertation, I investigate the contentious subject of sexualities as represented in fiction from selected Anglophone African countries which, even post-independence, have tended to enforce authoritarian, hetero-patriarchal control. The study explores how contemporary African writers, writing in (or in relation to) repressive contexts, represent uneasy intersections between socio-cultural understandings of sexuality, gender, and desire, entailing varieties of relation such as control, reciprocity, negotiation and resistance. Allowing for some flexibility in categories, the dissertation analyses the treatment of male sexualities in novels by Helon Habila, Moses Isegawa, and Tendai Huchu; female sexualities in novels by Sefi Atta, Doreen Baingana, and Lola Shoneyin, and depictions of queer sexualities in short fiction by Monica Arac de Nyeko, Chinelo Okparanta, Stanley Onjezani Kenani, and Beatrice Lamwaka. All of these writers, in their respective contexts, offer fictional representations that unevenly subvert hegemonic sexual norms and discourses, even while they also draw on received ways of making sense of gendered and sexual identities. The thesis argues that such ambiguities attest to the complexity of understanding and representing sexualities in Africa, and that fiction, precisely because of its capacity to engage uncertainty, comprises an important mode of mediating repressive socio-political and cultural norms, showing the potential for fiction as a space which engages risky, even taboo, topics. The fictional texts studied make a varied case against the common assumption of a restrictive, monolithic, supposedly proper “African sexuality” that authoritarian governments attempt to reinforce. I argue that through the narrative spaces of fiction, contemporary African authors highlight the tensions and contradictions which shape sexualities, with regimes of sexual knowledge being always in a process of relational negotiation, even in coercive socio-political contexts.