Doctoral Degrees (English)

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Browsing Doctoral Degrees (English) by Subject "African literature -- Women authors -- History and criticism"

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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.