Transgressing Boundaries: Gender, Identity, Culture, and the 'Other' in Postcolonial Women's Narratives in East Africa (Cross/Cultures, 164)

Oldfield, Elizabeth F.

ISBN 10: 9042036974 / ISBN 13: 9789042036970

Published by Brill, 2013

About this Item

Used - Like New. Book is new and unread but may have minor shelf wear. Your purchase helps support Sri Lankan Children's Charity 'The Rainbow Centre'. Our donations to The Rainbow Centre have helped provide an education and a safe haven to hundreds of children who live in appalling conditions.

Seller Inventory # Z1-R-019-01381

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Transgressing Boundaries: Gender, Identity, Culture, and the 'Other' in Postcolonial Women's Narratives in East Africa (Cross/Cultures, 164)
• Publisher: Brill
• Publication Date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9042036974
• ISBN 13: 9789042036970
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Like New

About this title

Synopsis

Fictions written between 1939 and 2005 by indigenous and white (post)colonial women writers emerging from an African–European cultural experience form the focus of this study. Their voyages into the European diasporic space in Africa are important for conveying how African women’s literature is situated in relation to colonialism. Notwithstanding the centrality of African literature in the new postcolonial literatures in English, the accomplishments of the indigenous writer Grace Ogot have been eclipsed by the critical attention given to her male counterparts, while Elspeth Huxley, Barbara Kimenye, and Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye, who are of Western cultural provenance but adopt an African perspective, are not accommodated by the genre of ‘expatriate literature’. The present study of both indigenous and white (post)colonial women’s narratives that are common to both categories fills this gap. Focused on the representation of gender, identity, culture, and the ‘Other’, the texts selected are set in Kenya and Uganda, and a main concern is with the extent to which they are influenced by setting and intercultural influences. The ‘African’ woman’s creation of textuality is at once the expression of female individualities and a transgression of boundaries. The particular category of fiction for children as written by Kimenye and Macgoye reveals the configuration of a voice and identity for the female ‘Other’ and writer which enables a subversive renegotiation of identity in the face of patriarchal traditions.

About the Author

Elizabeth F. Oldfield is Founder and Chair of the Focus on Africa Research Cluster, part of the Identity, Conflict and Representation Research Group at the University of Derby, where she currently teaches.