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| Title: | Without the West: 1990s southern African and Indian woman writers - a conversation? |
| Author: | Boehmer, Elleke |
| 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-) Yvonne Vera (1965-2005) |
| 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. |
