Confining Spaces, Resistant Subjectivities

This book represents a significant contribution to academic knowledge, making a compelling case for a contemporary analytical re-reading of a number of â oecoreâ postcolonial womenâ (TM)s narratives, such as Erna Brodberâ (TM)s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, Buchi Emechetaâ (TM)s The Joys of Motherhood, and Mariama Bââ (TM)s So Long a Letter. These narratives highlight diversity, contextuality, opposition, and metachrony, have a â oegenerative literary functionâ , and anticipate what have now become postcolonial feminist issues and debates. Bringing together feminist writing from a range of postcolonial contexts, the book contributes to a field represented by the critical writings of Francoise Lionnet, Ketu Katrak, and Elleke Boehmer, among others. The deconstructive, cultural approach of the book is mobilised to support an in-depth literary analysis which focuses on female oppression, difference, voice, and agency. Questions of what it means to be â oea womanâ and to be â oepostcolonialâ are read as central debates which emphasise â oemulti-vocal and multi-focalâ female narratives and perspectives. That is, they highlight the temporal, as well as cross-cultural links and implications of the selected narratives, which give the project a kind of positive complexity and linkage. Above all, the analysis of several unconventional modes and (physical/imaginative) spaces of female resistance, such as prison, widow confinement, and madness, yields some surprising results that are sustained by a close reading of the texts which are not only attentive to questions of genre, structure, imagery and narrative endings, but also oppositional, instructive and reconstructive.