The Politics of (M)Othering: Womanhood, Identity and Resistance in African Literature

by Obioma Nnaemeka (Editor)

Overview

This collection is a study of African literature framed by the central, and multi-faceted, idea of 'mother' - motherland, mothertongue, motherwit, motherhood, mothering - looking at the paradoxical location of (m)other as both central and marginal. Whilst the volume stands as a sustained feminist analysis, it engages feminist theory itself by showing how issues in feminism are, in African literature, recast in different and complex ways.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781134774371
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	08/04/2005
Series:	Opening Out: Feminism for Today , #1
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	438 KB

About the Author

Obioma Nnaemeka

Table of Contents

Dedication, Acknowledgements, Obioma Nnaemeka Introduction: Imag(in)ing Knowledge, Power, and Subversion in the Margins Trinh T. Minh-ha Mother's Talk Charles Sugnet Nervous Conditions: Dangarembga's Feminist Reinvention of Fanon Ousseynou B. Traor'e Why the Snake-Lizard Killed His Mother: Inscribing and Decentering Nneka in Things Fall Apart, Peter Hitchcock The Eye and the Other: The Gaze and the Look in Egyptian Feminist Fiction Uzo Esonwanne Enlightenment Epistemology and Aesthetic Cognition: Mariama B a's So Long a Letter Julianan Nfah-Abbenyi Calixthe Beyala's femme-fillette: Womanhood and the Politics of (M)Othering Cynthia Ward Bound to Matter: The Father's Pen and Mother Tongues Celeste Fraser Delgado Mother Tongues and Childless Women: The Construction of Kenyan Womanhood Huma Ibrahim Ontological Victimhood: Other Bodies in Madness and Exile, Toward a Third World Feminist Epistemology Obioma Nnaemeka Urban Spaces, Woman's Places: Polygamy as Sign in Mariama B a's Novels Ren'ee Larrier Reconstructing Motherhood: Francophone, African Women Autobiographers Fran,coise Lionnet Geographies of Pain: Captive Bodies and Violent Acts in the fictions of Gayl Jones, Bessie Head and Myriam Warner-Vieyra, Contributors

Editorial Reviews

'The volume moves from one compelling analysis to another ... it makes a refreshing change from the many recent 'African women's writing' anthologies, where literary critics tend to trawl through a now familar canon of women's novels. - Wasafiri

From the Publisher