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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | The Subject-Object Imperative: Women and the Colonial Struggle in Three West African Novels |
Author: | Layiwola, Dele |
Year: | 1998 |
Periodical: | African Study Monographs |
Volume: | 19 |
Issue: | 3 |
Pages: | 149-160 |
Language: | English |
Geographic terms: | Senegal Nigeria |
Subjects: | women literature Literature, Mass Media and the Press Women's Issues Religion and Witchcraft History and Exploration |
About persons: | Mariama Bâ (1929-1981) Sembène Ousmane (1923-2007) Buchi Emecheta (1944-2017) |
External link: | https://jambo.africa.kyoto-u.ac.jp/kiroku/asm_normal/abstracts/pdf/19-3/149-160.pdf |
Abstract: | In what ways does the subject-object imperative generate a methodology for the balance of perception in womanist literary criticism and the sociology of literature? Analysis of three novels within the destabilizing context of colonialism in West Africa, one from Nigeria - Buchi Emecheta's 'The Joys of Motherhood' (1988) - and two from Senegal - Mariama Ba's 'So Long a Letter' (1981) and Sembene Ousmane's 'God's Bits of Wood' (1970) - illustrates the ways women are either foregrounded in literature as interactive historical subjects or how false consciousness relegates them to the status of inert objects of history. Emecheta's novel represents early feminist articulation of a rural woman's outlook on life and culture in a situation of colonial urbanization. Ba's novel discusses puberty and married life from the perspective of an oppressed woman. Ousmane, a man sympathetic towards feminist matriarchy, or womanism, presents in his novel the complementary 'liberated' patriarchy groping towards a new balance. Lucien Goldmann's 'genetic structuralism' is adopted as the analytical methodology. Bibliogr., sum. |