Thesis (B.A. (Hons.))--University of Adelaide, Dept. of English, 1994? / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 53-55).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1981. / Typescript. Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 183-196).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Carolina at Wilmington, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves: [55]-56)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 2006. / Title from title page screen, viewed on April 27, 2007. Dissertation Committee: Ronald L. Strickland (chair), Susan Kalter, Kristin Dykstra, Elizabeth K. Stone. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 209-221) and abstract. Also available in print.

Thesis (B.A.) Cum Laude--Butler University, 1991. / Bbiliography: leaf 31.

Thesis (M. A.), Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1998. / Bibliography: leaves [165]-183.

Thesis (M.A. (English))--University of Pretoria, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references.

This study seeks to focus on the total female experience of African women and the reappropriation of a more authentic portrayal of the identity of women in African literature. In this dissertation, a chapter is devoted to each of the female protagonists in the three novels selected for discussion which are One is Enough (1981) by Flora Nwapa, Second-class Citizen by Buchi Emecheta (1975) and The Stillborn (1988) by Zaynab Alkali. Each chapter is named after the woman whose transformation it explores and the chapters are organised in a chronological sequence, that is, in the order that the writers of the texts were first published as authors of African literature, rather than according to the publication date of the text under discussion. The mode of treatment of the texts is dictated primarily by the womanist thrust and the central question of the way in which each of the female characters transcends the triple jeopardy of colour, class and gender to become a creative non-victim. The epithet 'creative transformation' in the title, therefore, describes the emergence of female characters in African writing who overturn the literary characterisation of the one-dimensional African woman who is a 'shadowy figure who hovers on the fringes of the plot, suckling infants, cooking' and 'plaiting' hair {Frank, 1987:14). The theoretical approach adopted for this study is largely of an eclectic nature but every effort has been made to establish a strong sense of the authenticity and credibility of the African woman's experience. In other words, the three texts chosen have been treated as both essentially social realist and African feminist texts read from a womanist perspective. The term ‘womanist’ is particularly valuable in the context of this study. The definition of womanism used in this study is that forwarded by critics such as Chikwenye Ogunyemi (1985) who states that ‘womanism believes in the freedom and independence of women like feminism’ but that ‘unlike feminism’, womanism ‘wants meaningful union between women and men and will wait for men to change their sexist stance’. The findings of this study show that the female protagonists achieve transformation not by reforming patriarchal systems, but by being creative and reappropriating their own identities within these often antagonistic systems. That is, the women achieve a measure of fulfillment and a strong sense of their own individuality within an imperfect context. Particularly in their individual responses to the experiences of marriage and motherhood in a traditional context and in their seeking an authentic identity, the characters in the novels studies create a framework that enables them to be the women they want to be and not the women society would like them to be: Amaka bears twins fathered by Izu, a Catholic priest; Adah – a mother of five – leaves a violent relationship to pursue a career as a writer and Li, after establishing an independent academic life, returns to her errant husband in the hope that they can rebuild their life together. / Dissertation (MA (English))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / English / unrestricted

Thesis (MA (English Literature))--University of Stellenbosch, 2009. / Notions of home, belonging, and identity haunt the creative minds of fiction writers belonging to and imagining the African diaspora. Detailing the ways in which two diasporic authors “re-visit history” and “re-negotiate identity”, this thesis grapples with the complexity of these notions and explores the boundaries of displacement and the search for new home-spaces. Finally, it engages with the ways in which both authors produce “new tribes” beyond the bounds of national or racial imaginaries. Following the “introduction”, the second chapter titled “River Crossing” offers a reading of Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore, which features a black African man fleeing his home-country in search of asylum in England. Here, I explore Phillips’s representation of the “postcolonial passage” to the north, and of the “shock of arrival” in England. I then analyse the ways in which the novel enacts a process of “messing with national identity”. While retracing the history of post-Windrush migration to England in order to engage contemporary immigration, A Distant Shore, I argue, also re-visits the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In the final section, I discuss “the economy of asylum” as I explore the fates of the novel’s two central characters: the African asylum-seeker and the outcast white English woman. My reading aims to advance two points made by the novel. Firstly, that individuals are not contained by the nations and cultures they belong to; rather, they are owned by the circumstances that determine the conditions of their displacement. Phillips strives to tell us that individuals remain the sites at which exclusionary discourses and theories about race, belonging and identity are re-elaborated. Secondly, I argue that no matter the effort exerted in trying to forget traumatic pasts in order to re-negotiate identity elsewhere, individuals remain prisoners of the chronotopes they have inhabited at the various stages of their passages. The third chapter focuses on Buchi Emecheta’s The New Tribe. Titled “Returning Home?”, it explores the implications of Emecheta’s reversal of the trajectory of displacement from diasporic locations to Africa. The New Tribe allows for the possibility of re-imagining the Middle Passage and re-figuring the controversial notion of the return to roots. In the novel, a young black British man embarks on a journey to Africa in search of a mythic lost kingdom. While not enabling him to return to roots, this journey eventually encourages him to come to terms with his diasporic identity. Continuing to grapple with notions of “home”, now through the trope of family and by engaging the “rhetoric of return”, I explore how Emecheta re-visits the past in order to produce new identities in the present. Emecheta’s writing reveals in particular the gendered consequences of the “rhetoric of return”. Narratives of return to Africa, the novel suggests, revisit colonial fantasies and foster patriarchal gender bias. The text juxtaposes such metaphors against the lived experience of black women in order to demythologise the return to Africa and to redirect diasporic subjects to the diasporic locations that constitute genuine sites for re-negotiating identity.

This study explores the notion of female cultural difference in the context of dominant patriarchal and other oppressive patriarchal structures. Essentially, its focus is on deconstructing stereotypical images of women, who are often perceived as homogenous. Throughout the study I argue that as much as their sensibilities are varied, African and African American women respond differently to the oppressive conditions they find themselves in. The following selected texts provided the opportunities for exploring and evaluating the genealogy of female cultural difference that is central to my research: Anthills of the Savannah (Chinua Achebe); Scarlet Song (Mariama Ba); The Joys of Motherhood and Kehinde (BuchiEmecheta); Their Eyes Were Watching God (Nora Zeale Hurston); Bitches Brew and Seven Steps to Heaven (Fred Khumalo). In the process of analyzing these texts, I demonstrated that the notion of cultural difference is often narrowly and erroneously construed. I discovered that the protagonists in these texts are not only conscious of their oppressed condition but often adopt strategic agency to contest male privileges that silence them. In pursuit of this critical perspective, I have proceeded to apply relevant theoretical frameworks constructed by Cornel West, Hudson-Weems, Bakhtin and a conflation of others whose philosophical tenets support the major theoretical frameworks. The aforementioned literary critics have enabled me to come up with a more comprehensive and richer analysis of the set texts. In my analysis I have advanced the argument that female visibility manifests itself variously and temporally through individual and sometimes sisterly attempts at empowerment, self- definition and esoteric discursive features. I noted that all this is evidence of the nascent creative potential in African women who refuse to be silenced. In my analysis of the Seven texts I have incorporated, modified and developed some of the insights from critical thinkers who engage in the ongoing debate about female cultural difference. This approach has enabled me to come up with new insights that ferret out veneers of African women’s rich cultural diversity, in light of the ever changing nature of women’s operational spaces. It is this transcendental vision that basically informs and resonates with my study. / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil. (English)