Postnational feminism in Third World women\u27s literature

This dissertation investigates selected third world women writers\u27 texts to explore how they reevaluate the relationship between woman and nation from postcolonial feminist perspectives. Further, this dissertation proposes that these texts, Kamala Maskandaya\u27s Nectar in a Sieve (1954), Anita Desai\u27s Clear Light of Day (1980), Tsitsi Dangarembga\u27s Nervous Conditions (1988), and Ama Ata Aidoo\u27s Changes (1991), revealing a rootedness in the nation, resist national cultures, which are complicit with patriarchal ideologies, making it possible for us to see their national constructions of woman\u27s identity as postnational. Chapter One formulates the dissertation\u27s theoretical framework, drawing on selected writings of postcolonial third world feminist critics, among others, that are relevant to my discussion. Applying Benedict Anderson\u27s concept of nation and identity as imagined constructs, in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, I explore how these texts challenge the imagined patriarchal constructions of women as signifiers of national cultures. Chapter Two focuses on the impact of Markandaya\u27s colonial heritage and diasporic consciousness in generating an ambivalence towards the concept of nationalism as seen in Nectar in a Sieve. Chapter Three analyzes how Dangarembga\u27s feminist consciousness critiques the role of colonial and patriarchal agendas in creating a nervous national culture with neocolonial repercussions for women. Chapter Four compares feminist consciousness across cultural, geographical, and historical differences in Nectar in a Sieve and Nervous Conditions to examine how the latter text\u27s postcolonial awareness reconceptualizes woman\u27s empowerment. Chapter Five explores third world feminism, decolonization, and the modes of resistance to patriarchal structures in Changes, Clear Light of Day, and Nervous Conditions. Chapter Six, the Conclusion, offers a few questions for further exploration. Central to my analysis is the postnationalism I read into these texts which, I suggest, derives from the writers\u27 more immediate concerns with female empowerment that problematize the female gendered identity and critique the role of nationalism, particularly in its complicity with the patriarchal. In doing so, these writers\u27 diasporic consciousness leads towards a postnational conceptual paradigm, which reveals what is most particular in their writings--an inherent paradox implicit in that they both oppose and reaffirm nationalistic agendas