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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Reading the figure of woman in African literature: psychoanalysis, difference, and desire
Author:Counihan, ClareISNI
Year:2007
Periodical:Research in African Literatures
Volume:38
Issue:2
Pages:161-180
Language:English
Geographic terms:Nigeria
Zimbabwe
Subjects:novels
women
psychoanalysis
gender roles
About persons:Albert Chinualumogu Achebe (1930-2013)ISNI
Tsitsi Dangarembga (1959-)ISNI
Frantz Fanon (1925-1961)ISNI
External link:http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/research_in_african_literatures/v038/38.2counihan.pdf
Abstract:This article examines two interconnected discourses of racial identity in colonial and postcolonial writing to challenge the narratives of difference as they now exist in postcolonial theory. In 'Black skin, white masks' (1967), Frantz Fanon translates psychoanalysis from a discourse of sexual difference into a discourse of racial difference while explaining the colonial condition. Homi Bhabha subsequently adopts this specific Fanon to create his own psychoanalytic narrative, centred around desire. Rewriting sexual into racial difference, however, introduces a ghost into postcolonial theory: the figure of woman. Marking the site at which translation becomes visible and haunting, she reveals both what is at stake in the act of translation and what is being occluded - the disposition of desire. Rereading Chinua Achebe's 'Things fall apart' and Tsitsi Dangarembga's 'Nervous conditions', the essay argues that attending to the figure of woman enables revised understandings of African literature and postcolonial subjectivity. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract]
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