Healing the Wounds of the Colonised Body: Writing Back in Twenty-first-century Works by British Caribbean Women Writers Thesis abstract Veronika Vítková Black women`s position within the world of male superiority and white supremacy came to be characterised by the term "double colonisation". Both patriarchal and imperial social order focused on their corporeality to justify their subjugation. Accordingly, black women writers came to conceptualise their experience of colonisation and slavery as wounds suffered by the black female body. They thereby use the master`s tools to dismantle the master`s house. Their "writing back" - a means of healing the body - constitutes a multi-level response to both sets of mythologies as well as other types of marginalisation and othering, which the two involved, such as sexual, territorial or discursive. It results in the construction of a complex space - a healing vision - which is not dissimilar to Homi Bhabha`s empowering theoretical concepts. However, while providing such progressive literary vision, black women writers also maintain connection with reality, where, as Gayatri Spivak argued, there is no space from where the subaltern sexed subject can speak. Their broad historical and geographical perspective, which is a product of the multi-levelness of their oppression,...

<p>Taking as its pretext the contemporary moment of self-reflexive critique on the part of interdisciplinary programs like Women's Studies and American Studies, <italic>Reading Democracy</italic> historicizes a black feminist literary critical practice and movement that developed alongside black feminist activism beginning in the 1970s. This dissertation addresses the future direction of scholarship based in Women's Studies and African-American Studies by focusing on the institutionalized political effects of Women's Liberation and the black liberation movements: the canonization of black women's writing and the development of a black feminist critical practice. Tracing a variety of conceptions of black feminist criticism over the course of two decades, I argue that this critical tradition is virtually indefinable apart from its anthological framing and that its literary objects illustrate the radical democratic constitution of black women's political subjectivity. </p><p>The editors of such anthologies of African American women's writing and black feminist practice as Toni Cade Bambara's <italic>The Black Woman</italic> (1970), Mary Helen Washington's <italic>Black-Eyed Susans</italic> (1975), and Barbara Smith's <italic>Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology</italic> (1984) articulate the relationship of political praxis to creative enterprise and intellectual activity. In the case of Smith's anthology, for example, "coalition politics" emerges as the ideal democratic practice by which individuals constitute political identities, consolidate around political principles, and negotiate political demands.</p><p>Situating anthologies of black women's writing in relation to the social movement politics of the 1960s and 1970s, Reading Democracy explores how black feminist projects in the academy and the arts materialized the democratic principles of modern politics in the United States, understanding these principles as ethical desires that inspire self-constitution and creative and scholarly production. Constructing a literary critical and publication history, this dissertation identifies the democratic principles that the anthologies in this study materialize by analyzing them alongside the novels and short stories published during the 1970s and 1980s that they excerpt or otherwise reference, such as Toni Morrison's <italic>The Bluest Eye</italic> (1970), Audre Lorde's <italic>Zami: A New Spelling of My Name</italic> (1982), and Paule Marshall's <italic>Praisesong for the Widow</italic> (1983). The anthology facilitates the analysis of the single creative work's black feminist consciousness. Using the critical terms of democratic theory to mark the fulfillment of a political theory of black women's writing, as Smith first proposed, this dissertation arrives at a sense of democracy as a strategic zone of embodiment and a modern political imaginary forged by the recognition of "the others" in our midst who are coming to voice and are ineluctably constituted by the same ethical desires as are we ourselves.</p> / Dissertation

Through a content analysis of the maternal relationships in Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers Gardens, the author evaluates how southern black women writers construct black motherhood. This study is based on the premise that Eurocentric paradigms of motherhood confine black mothers to controlling images that continue to criminalize, distort, and devalue black motherhood. The researcher finds that the institution of black motherhood exists independently of Eurocentric paradigms. The conclusions drawn from these findings suggest that black women writers construct motherhood in terms of Womanist leadership. In the aforementioned memoirs, Womanist leadership is learned and defined in the black church. In summation, this thesis finds that southern black women writers use spiritual reconciliation as a form of Womanist leadership.

Le passage de l'Afrique du Sud d'un système politique répressif à un système démocratique a ouvert un nouvel espace de parole aux exclus, notamment aux femmes noires à travers les Commissions pour la Vérité. La parole féminine noire libérée suite à la transition politique du pays se reflète aussi dans le développement d'une production littéraire féminine, donnant lieu à l'émergence de nouvelles formes d'écriture romanesque, étudiées dans ce travail qui porte sur dix romans publiés par huit auteures entre 1998 et 2011 : S. Magona, K.L. Molope, K. Matlwa, A.N. Sithebe, A. Makholwa, H.J. Gololai, Z. Wanner et C. Jele. Nous étudions dans un premier temps comment les écrivaines s'approprient le genre romanesque durant la période transitionnelle, s'éloignant d'une écriture réaliste politiquement engagée, courante durant l'apartheid, pour se tourner vers une écriture de l'intime qui met en lumière les traumatismes d'un passé national qui hante le présent. Puis, nous étudions dans les trois parties suivantes comment les auteures émergeant durant la période post-transitionnelle explorent des genres jusqu’ici peu utilisés par les femmes noires sud-africaines : le Bildungsroman, le roman policier et la chick lit, mettant en mots les peurs et les angoisses de la nouvelle Afrique du Sud. Revisitant des genres européens, pour certains populaires, à travers une perspective féminine noire nouvelle, ces auteures continuent d'innover tant dans les thématiques abordées que dans une écriture fondée sur le mélange. Le roman devient un moyen subversif pour critiquer une société patriarcale fortement occidentalisée, qui ne doit pas renier son passé afin de faire face aux nouveaux défis à venir. / The South African political transition from a repressive system to a democratic one opened new spaces to a marginalized part of the population among whom the black woman to express themselves, such as the Truth and Reconciliation hearings. This black feminine voice, made free by the political transition is reflected through the development of a literary female production. It gave way to the emergence of new novelistic forms, analysed in our study through ten novels written by eight different female writers between 1998 and 2011: S. Magona, K.L. Molope, K. Matlwa, A.N. Sithebe, A. Makholwa, H.J. Gololai, Z. Wanner and C. Jele. In a first part, we analyse the way these authors rewrite the novel during the transitional period, moving away from a realistic writing, deeply involved in politics and largely used during the apartheid era, towards a more intimate way of writing which reflect the traumas of a national past haunting the present. Then, we examine in three parts how the writers emerging during the post-transitional period explore new genres, rarely used by black South African women until then, namely the Bildungsroman, detective fiction and chick lit, which reflect their fears in the new South Africa. These authors rewrite these European genres, among which popular ones, through a new feminine perspective, thus innovating the themes they deal with and creating a literature made of mixtures. The European novel becomes a subversive tool to criticise a patriarchal and Europeanised society, which, according to these authors, should not deny the past in order to solve the new challenges coming.

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<p dir="ltr">This dissertation is a Black feminist qualitative inquiry of the interconnections between Black women, literary activity, community, activism, and restoration and healing. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance and the Black feminist movement converged to create one of the richest periods in Black women’s history. Black women came together in community, through the text, and through various literary spaces–often despite or even because of their differences–to build an archive that articulates a multivocal Black women’s standpoint which many believed to be monotonously singular. During this period, for example, Black women writer-activists wrote more novels, plays, and poetry in these two decades than in any period prior while also establishing new literary traditions. These traditions included the recovery of previously published yet out of print Black women writers, the development of the Black Women Anthology era, the creation of Black women writer-activist collectives, the founding of bookstores, as well as the development of Black Women’s Studies and Black feminist literary criticism in the academy. In the dissertation, these traditions are intrinsically tied to the articulation and definition of the theoretical concept of literary kinship. Conceptually, relationally, and materially literary kinship is the connection generated by the intergenerational literary activity between Black women and girls. In the dissertation, I use literary activity in slightly different ways including to denote community-engaged oral practices, publication, relationships defined around literary sites, and the practice of reading. Literary kinship provides access to community based on and derived from a connection to the literary that is often marked by intergenerational activity. I argue that Black women writer-activists during the period of the BWLR articulate and define literary kinship as a practice of communal restoration and healing for individuals and the collective.</p><p dir="ltr">Literary kinship is explored in four interrelated, yet distinct ways in the dissertation. In chapter two, literary kinship is located in and operationalized through Black women’s literary kinship “networks” founded during the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance. In chapter three, the focus is on the Black Women’s Anthology era that begins in 1970 and becomes a pipeline for the development of the interdisciplinary field of Black Women’s Studies in the 1980s. The fourth and fifth chapters shift the impact of the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance to the 21st century and examines how literary kinship is rearticulated or re-visioned a generation later. The fourth chapter, in this vein, uses autoethnography and literary analysis to illuminate the interconnections between Black girlhood, geography, and my concept of literary kinship. The chapter explores my experience of literary kinship at the kitchen table, in public libraries, and in secondary and higher education as transformative opportunities that fostered my love for reading, engaging in literary community, and developing reading as a restorative and healing practice. In the final chapter, the rapid reemergence of Black women booksellers and their bookstores in the last five years (2018-2023) become integral to a contemporary rearticulation of literary kinship.</p><p dir="ltr">The Black Women’s Literary Renaissance is a significant period of literary output by Black women writer-activists that has had intergenerational impact in the lives of Black women. During the Renaissance, Black women writer-activists were catalysts for critical and necessary literary interventions, strategies, and methods that supported their sociopolitical activism, the development of a rich Black feminist and literary archive, and that manifested community functional practices of restoration and healing. Black women’s articulation, definition, and utilization of literary kinship in the 20th and 21st centuries has supported their literary labors as activists, as intellectuals, and as community members, and is therefore a practice of community restoration and healing.</p>