African fictions and feminisms: Making history and remaking traditions.

This dissertation uses Bakhtinian intertextuality as a heuristic to read in pairs six contemporary African and Caribbean women's novels. The three dialogues offer alternative literary histories to those of the dominant canons, thus simultaneously constructing and resisting literary genealogies. In addition to history and tradition, the pairs engage figurations of female sexuality, focusing respectively on motherhood, transgressive genital sexuality and polygyny. Each novel is read against the other half of its pair, but also against another literary or historical text, thereby outlining the larger discursive frame in which it was formed and to which it responds. The first chapter examines the beginning of a Nigerian (Igbo) women's novelistic tradition. The archival absence of the Igbo Women's War serves as metaphor for a heretofore unwritten literary history. Buchi Emecheta writes The Joys of Motherhood as a daughter-text to Flora Nwapa's Efuru. This dialogue foregrounds Efuru's status as the first novel published by a black African woman; it also interrogates the figure of African-woman-as-mother, conflating the production of texts with the production of children. The second chapter reads the construction of history sexuality in the (Afro-) Caribbean through the radically different perspectives of Maryse Conde's Heremakhonon and Michelle Cliff's Abeng. Heremakhonon engages the topos of historical absence through a return to Africa, inscribing the continent phallically and imploding the myth of the sexually excessive black woman. Abeng, however, reappropriates the native male inscription of the land as feminine, reclaiming the historical void through geo-historical vaginal figures and a black lesbian continuum. Through Islamic polygyny, the third chapter constructs an interracial African dialogue on romance ideology and the institution of marriage. Although Ramatoulaye remains invested in (monogamous) marriage, Une si longue lettre by Mariama Ba embeds a critique of male nationalism by juxtaposing that discourse against that of a romance narrative. Advancing this logic, Assia Djebar's Ombre sultane rewrites the polygynous marriage from a competition for the man to a female dialogue; he becomes the inconsequential third term, the catalyst for a final rebellion.Ph.D.African literatureBlack studiesCaribbean literatureComparative literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/128966/2/9308264.pd