In an age compounded by diversity, this dissertation seeks a common ground among the multifarious experiences of America. It argues that the land, the physical and the metaphysical, the lived and the perceived space that is referential to all, constitutes a primeval experience--the imagination of America. If Anglo-Americans once envisioned a virgin land on which to build a New World Garden, ethnic groups have their founding myths of America: While the Navajo Indians perceive a "house made of dawn," Chicanos reclaim the mythic "heart of Aztlan" in the Southwest; and while Afro-Americans hail "home to Harlem," Chinese Americans "go-out-on-the-road" to the legendary Gold Mountain in California. Conceptually, the study employs Henry Nash Smith's (1950) critical notion of myth: "a poetic idea, a collective representation." While Smith historicizes the westward expansion of the "virgin land," Annette Kolodny (1984) provides a paradigm of middle-class white women taunting and questioning the male-centered "virgin land." Kolodny is important not only because she polarizes the male and female fantasies, but because, by exposing the woman as one category of "otherness," she relates womanhood to ethnicity. The study hence deconstructs the myth of virgin land by contesting the issues of ethnicity and gender in imagining America. It investigates the images of Aztlan, la Mestiza, Harlem, the "house made of dawn," and the Gold Mountain to surface the common ground of a mythic element in our imaginations of America. It emphasizes the ethnic woman's need to carve out the "land before her" in both racial and gender terms. This is done structurally by pairing a male and a female writer in each ethnic group: (1) N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Silko; (2) Rudolfo Anaya and Gloria Anzaldua; (3) Claude McKay and Zora Neale Hurston; (4) Louis Chu and Maxine Hong Kingston. By comparing male and female writers and by juxtaposing multiethnic writers, this study transgresses sensibly and fluidly among Ethnic Studies, Women Studies, and American Studies. Mostly, it lands on a common ground to illuminate from various angles the lure of the land.

The literatures emerging from the postcolonial world bring new dimensions of linguistic heterogeneity to English literature, opening up rich possibilities for the heteroglossia and interanimation of languages celebrated by Mikhail Bakhtin. Two case studies illustrate the “breaking” and remaking of the English language in postcolonial literatures. Pidgins, oral vernaculars born in the colonial contact zone and developed outside institutional channels, compel our interest as linguistic realizations of a subaltern hybridity and as the most markedly “broken” varieties of English. Within Nigerian literature, representations of pidgin English play a variety of transgressive roles. In two specimens of Onitsha market literature, pidgin is spoken only by clownish chiefs, but in one of these, Ogali A. Ogali's 1956 Veronica My Daughter, pidgin also functions as an anti-language providing a critical perspective on the “big grammar” of standard English. In Chinua Achebe's No Longer at Ease (1960) pidgin is often associated with the seamy underside of life, while in Wole Soyinka's The Interpreters (1965) it is the vehicle for a resistant counterknowledge. Finally, in Ken Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy (1985), “rotten English,” a mixed language strongly colored by pidgin, escapes the confines of quotation marks to become the language of narration. The second case study is of the work of Salman Rushdie, arguably the paradigmatic postcolonial author—a writer positioned between East and West, between the English language and the polylingualism of South Asia, and renowned for his inventive linguistic experimentation. Chapter 7 explores his short story “The Courter,” a story of linguistic and personal dislocation and transformation in which a mispronounced word brings about a new reality. Chapter 8 is an extended exploration of the languages in Midnight's Children and the translational magic of Saleem Sinai's “All-India Radio.” Chapter 9 examines ways in which Rushdie unsettles borders, redefining the boundaries of words and bringing languages into new relationships by means of such devices as the translingual pun. The concluding chapter briefly explores the implications of this postcolonial breaking of English for the novel and for the language of English literature.

This dissertation explores the experience of modernity outside of Europe by considering the portrayal of the railway in selected literature of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. I examine what I see as a mutually constitutive process: the way subjectivity is constructed within modernity, and the way modernity, in turn, transforms as it travels to the “periphery.” My dissertation explores these transformations by looking at the way people inhabit, resist and remake the spaces in and around the railway. Using literary works by Senegalese writer Sembène Ousmane, Turkish poet Nâzim Hikmet, and selected South Asian writers, I consider the place of aesthetics and representation in this process. I argue that all these authors contribute to a genre that might be called postcolonial modernism, literature from the Third World that is both creating and responding to the advent of modernity. Chapter One provides an overview of theories of modernity. My discussion brings together those critics who theorize modernity primarily within the Western context and those who have opened a discussion of alternative modernities. Chapter Two introduces contemporary theories of space as a way to explore how modernity travels. Looking specifically at spaces of the railway, I consider how modernity is realized through material and imaginative practices. Chapter Three focuses on Sembène Ousmane's God's Bits of Wood (1960), and demonstrates how the novel's conflict between generations during the colonial period reveals two relationships to modernity that coexist in the colonial setting. My fourth chapter brings the discussion to the context of South Asia and the literature of partition, including Khushwant Singh's novel Train to Pakistan (1956). I argue that these Indian and Pakistani writers represent the railway as a contradictory space traversing a geography fragmented by communal allegiances. Chapter Five analyzes Turkish poet Nâzim Hikmet's epic poem Human Landscapes (1950), written during a period of intense national modernization. I present Hikmet's view of modernity as an ambivalent one, representing the altered modes of perception brought by modern technology at the same time underscoring, through his portrayal of the Turkish peasantry, the fact that modernity has not fulfilled its promise of emancipation.

This study examines the novels of Caryl Phillips, J. M. Coetzee, and Michael Ondaatje, writers originally from post-colonial countries—St. Kitts, South Africa, and Sri Lanka respectively—who explore the ambivalences engendered by colonialism rather than conforming to a one-dimensional understanding of postcolonial literature which focuses exclusively on the reactionary nature of this type of writing. What enables these writers to transcend the simple binarisms of colonizer and colonized and to concentrate on the ambiguities of the postcolonial condition is their use of postmodern stylistic elements which emphasize complexity and irresolution. Phillips embraces postmodern fragmentation by segmenting his fiction into multiple, often unrelated stories. In opting to juxtapose fragments of stories, Phillips matches his narrative form to his thematic interest in the dislocation experienced by people of the African diaspora. The first chapter examines The Final Passage, Higher Ground, and The Nature of Blood to demonstrate that fragmentation becomes more deeply embedded in Phillips's narrative structure as his novels advance. Coetzee's fiction is reflective of a postmodern aesthetic in its unreliability and indeterminancy. This stylistic feature enables Coetzee to address postcolonial concerns in South Africa where the reliability of any subject position has been undermined by rigid racial divisions. The second chapter analyzes Coetzee's various types of narrative voices: the untrustworthy narrator whose views are clearly objectionable (Dusklands); the unreliable narrator whose perspective is limited (Waiting for the Barbarians); and the unreadable narrator who escapes any certainties (Life & Times of Michael K). The third chapter explores Michael Ondaatje's use of a self-conscious playfulness with language. Ondaatje incorporates magic realism, intertextuality, and a poetic perspective in his novels, which are either situated in one particular setting (In the Skin of a Lion) or in a plurality of locals (The English Patient, to highlight the bizarre and traumatic circumstances that mark the postcolonial experience of exile and to depict the way that his characters' lives tend to be mythic in scale as a consequence. In turning to the intersection of the postmodern and the postcolonial, Phillips, Coetzee, and Ondaatje convey a highly nuanced understanding of postcolonial existence and of the human condition.

This dissertation explores the nature and context of the dialogue between African and African American writers, buttressed by the extensive use of history and memory by Chinua Achebe, John Edgar Wideman, and Zakes Mda, the three writers at the center of this study. Through the reading of three primary texts – Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Wideman’s The Cattle Killing, and Mda’s The Heart of Redness – the dissertation examines not only the writers’ engagement with memory and history but also their deployment of “African” metaphysics, modes of apprehension and narrative traditions. The study foregrounds how a growing number of contemporary African and African American writers share an interest in probing connections, common fissures and tensions in their historical experiences. It explores the writers’ investment in history, concern with memory acts, the deployment of the logistics of ogbanje and its allied concepts within their communicative economies, and their involvement in a tripartite trans-Atlantic response to hegemonic discourse.

This dissertation seeks to argue that the vast majority of Black South African writers were no neutral sitters on the fence under apartheid rule. Each generation of Black writers assiduously and consciously deployed different genres and techniques in recording the plight of their people during years and years of subjugation under Nationalist rule. However, for each generation of committed Black South African writers the objectives were essentially consistent: to inspire, record and aid revolt against an unjust system which had been universally condemned as a crime against humanity. This dissertation is a story about the engagement of Black South African writing with its political context. It is also a journey back of sorts, because the Black writers who are at its core take us back to different phases and seasons of our shameful past as a fractured society. They take us through the consequences of the Land Act of 1913, which is universally regarded as one of the world's infamous acts of social engineering; they take us back to the notorious Bantu Education Act and its tragic consequences. In the early years of consolidating democracy in South Africa, there must be a galvanizing and self-critical vision of the goals of our society. Such a vision in turn requires a clear-sighted grasp of what was wrong in the past. It is indeed a blind progeny that acts without indebtedness to the past. The composition and orientation of Black writers who constitute this dissertation are eclectic. The dissertation draws heavily on the writings of world-renowned luminaries such as Es'kia Mphahlele, Wally Serote, Mbulelo Mzamane and Njabulo Ndebele. This dissertation falls squarely under the Citizenship Studies rubric and seeks to argue further that the Nationalists' vision of citizenship was seriously flawed because it was exclusive, violent, sectional and rooted in bigotry and racism. The task of reconstructing the post-apartheid society is going to involve massive acts of interpretation in which the historical memory will be a crucial factor.

This dissertation investigates selected third world women writers' 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's Nectar in a Sieve (1954), Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day (1980), Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions (1988), and Ama Ata Aidoo's 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's identity as postnational. Chapter One formulates the dissertation's theoretical framework, drawing on selected writings of postcolonial third world feminist critics, among others, that are relevant to my discussion. Applying Benedict Anderson's 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's 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's 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's postcolonial awareness reconceptualizes woman's 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' 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' 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.

This study explores writing, publishing, and reading practices in West Africa through the lens of one emerging woman writer's experiences. Ghanaian novelist Amma Darko, the author of Beyond the Horizon and The Housemaid, provides an exemplar of the challenges facing women writers in the region today: lack of time and space to write, lack of literary mentors, inadequate access to books written by sister writers on the continent or even in their own countries. Despite these difficulties, Darko has persisted in writing novels that speak vividly to contemporary issues for African women. The dissertation analyzes the daily practices that have enabled her to develop a writing life, the publishing history of her works, and the cultural contexts in which she is read now and may be read in the future at home and abroad. The publishing landscape for African women writers like Darko consists of multinational publishers, small Third World advocacy presses, and struggling indigenous publishing houses. Each one has its strengths and weaknesses in the circle of cultural production. Darko's reputation abroad has been made by the first two; she may become more widely known locally through the third. Although there is evidence of a “book famine” caused by economic crises in West Africa, increasing numbers of West African women do read for pleasure and are hungry for good stories that relate to their lives, whether those are Western bestsellers or African-centered romance fiction. Darko's works, until recently little known in Ghana or the U.S., bridge the gap between the high-culture literature of the classroom and low-culture popular fiction. Amma Darko represents a new generation that is writing its way forward from an existing West African women's literary tradition to new possibilities in themes, styles, and readership. In contrast to the image of African women writers as “silenced,” the appendix identifies 159 West African women who have published novels or short story collections in the last seventy years.

Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-01

Doctor Educationis / Romantic love has been neglected in the study of African literature and culture. It has been misconstrued and overlooked in canonical African literature, and the scholarship of that literature. Only recently has some attention been directed to African popular romance writing. The main focus of African literature and its scholarship fell on questions of history, colonial resistance, and, later, in the work of women writers, on gender oppression. This neglect is gradually being addressed. Romantic love is slowly getting more recognition than before in the study of African literature, and as evidenced in popular culture by recent African imprints like the South African-based Sapphire imprint, and Nollybooks and Okada Books in Nigeria, among others. The Ankara popular romances under study in this thesis focus on the concerns of contemporary African women and suggest resolutions to their problems. Although they are in some ways similar to Anglo-American romance fiction like Mills and Boon and Harlequin, they present some concerns specific to their context. Among these are questions of childbearing, locally relevant questions related to work and career, and contextually shaped issues around desire and the erotic. The contemporary Ankara novellas have been read against the backdrop of Flora Nwapa’s novel Efuru, a first-generation African novel written by the first published African woman writer. We see that the dilemmas encountered by the Ankara heroines represent the concerns of Efuru, Nwapa’s heroine, with some variation in some cases. Of the Ankara novellas published to date, the following titles will be studied, namely, A Tailor-Made Romance by Oyindamola Affinih, Love Me Unconditionally by Ola Awonubi, A Taste of Love by Sifa Asani Gowon, The Elevator Kiss by Amina Thula, Finding Love Again by Chioma Iwunze-Ibiam and Love’s Persuasion also by Ola Awonubi. The thesis establishes that the resolution of the Ankara novellas is different from the ending of Efuru. Nwapa leaves Efuru’s dilemmas unresolved, whereas the Ankara novellas, because they are romances, present idealised resolutions in which model heroes, who manifest transformations coming to being in society more generally, constitute the wished-for happy-ever-after ending.