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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Without the West: 1990s southern African and Indian woman writers - a conversation?
Author:Boehmer, EllekeISNI
Year:1999
Periodical:African Studies
Volume:58
Issue:2
Period:December
Pages:157-170
Language:English
Geographic terms:India
South Africa
Southern Africa
Zimbabwe
Subjects:literature
Literature, Mass Media and the Press
Women's Issues
About persons:Sindiwe Magona (1943-)ISNI
Yvonne Vera (1965-2005)ISNI
External link:https://doi.org/10.1080/00020189908707912
Abstract:This article examines novels by women writers new to the literary stage: Manju Kapur and Arundhati Roy from India, Yvonne Vera from Zimbabwe and Sindiwe Magona from South Africa. By reading their texts in juxtaposition, thereby circumventing the West, it is possible to construct an interaction between them and reveal their imagined spaces of identity. Drawing on the works of Gillian Rose (1993), Chandra Mohanty (1992) and Rosemary M. George (1996) the present author considers whether it is possible to begin to map a revised politics of location in these narratives, and to observe a constitution of narrative identities that are at times overlapping, at times in opposition, and that may, or not, share points of contact with the national imaginary, the national space. Projecting characters across experiences of repeated dislocation, the narratives inevitably distress, disperse, or disregard the unifying narrative of the postcolonial nation, which always implies location in homogenized and often masculine space. The conclusion is that in the case of both regions, there is a gradual return to approaches and styles more typically emerging out of vernacular narratives. Home for the writers under discussion is experienced as being at once grounded, even if temporarily, and up in the air, in the sense of provisional. Bibliogr., notes, ref.
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