This dissertation seeks to explore the perceived intricate relationship that exists between constructed identity, discrimination and violence as portrayed in Bessie Head's trilogy from varying perspectives, including aspects of postcoloniality, materialist feminism and liminality. Starting with a background to some of the origins of racial hybridity in Southern Africa, it looks at how racial identity has subsequently influenced the course of Southern African history and thereafter explores historical and biographical information deemed relevant to an understanding of the dissertation. Critical explorations of each text in the trilogy follow, in which the apparent affinities that exist between identity, discrimination and violence are analysed and displayed. In conclusion the trilogy is discussed from a largely sociological perspective of hope in a utopian society. / English Studies / M.A.(English)

This dissertation, “Fictions of Development: Decolonization, Development Economics, and the African Novel,” maps the tensions as well as the surprising resonances and interdependencies between development institutions and African literary production. The arc of the dissertation begins in the early 1960s, as many postcolonial countries marked their independence by embarking on ambitious national development programs. It extends through the turbulent 1970s, during which the Global South agitated for a New International Economic Order that would deliver “trade, not aid,” and the reactionary 1980s, in which the World Bank and the IMF pressured governments across the Global South into adopting a series of macroeconomic reforms known as structural adjustment. The dissertation ends in the present moment, as pressing social and environmental concerns have given rise to a (supposedly) new era of “sustainable” development. Taken as a whole, “Fictions of Development” unsettles received notions about both development and African literature. Scholars working in and around postcolonial studies have long understood development as the contemporary counterpart to, and outgrowth of, the “civilizing mission” that once underwrote centuries of European conquest and colonization. Such close ties between colonialism and development have given rise to the widespread assumption that postcolonial writers, in rejecting colonialism, also rejected development. However, by turning to the historical interactions between writers from “developing” countries and the organizations charged with the task of “developing” those countries, this dissertation tells a more complex story. Applying the tools and methods of literary criticism to a wide range of materials—from novels, plays, and memoirs to national economic planning documents, World Bank mission reports, and tourist brochures—this dissertation traces some of the ways that western development institutions use narrative form to stake their claims to knowledge of (and therefore power over) the so-called “developing” world. It also shows how four African writers—Botswana’s Bessie Head, Ghana’s Ama Ata Aidoo, Kenya’s Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Zimbabwe’s Tsitsi Dangarembga—use the narrative form of the novel to propose alternative visions of development grounded in the principles of social and economic wellbeing.

This study explores the triple imbrications of race, power and gender in the selected novels of Bessie Head. A critical analysis of Maru (1971) and A Question of' Power (1974) is undertaken with a view to identifying the subordinating and the marginalising tropes that result in silencing of female subjectivities in Head's protagonists. Linked to a critical reading of the novels, this study examines the role of cultural and psychological forces in maintaining patriarchal hegemony, which is based upon hierarchy and domination of women rather than equality. Furthennore, this dissertation suggests that Head's depiction of narrow ethnic and racial bigotry serves a broader etiological purpose of accounting for "the state of thingsff within the South African context. Thus this study oscillates between the abstract constructs and the concrete social experiences within which Bessie Head's literary imagination subsists. In this study, particular attention is paid, in addition to critiques of individual texts, to some of Head's biographical elements with a view on the one hand, to highlighting the moments, events and issues which are reflected as " contexts of her-story" and on the other, to amplifying how Head's formative experiences contribute to her critique of the exploitative racially structured narratives. By using Foucault's theories within the social constructionist model, this dissertation aims to demonstrate the insidious intersections between racism and sexism and how these constructs are implicated in the conception and construction of power. Specifically, this study argues that due to their arbitrary applications, racial and sexual difference be viewed as dynamic and contested, rather than fixed. A synthesis is reached which accords literarure a role within the framework of socio-cultural practice in general. / English Studies / M.A. (English)

This study explores the triple imbrications of race, power and gender in the selected novels of Bessie Head. A critical analysis of Maru (1971) and A Question of' Power (1974) is undertaken with a view to identifying the subordinating and the marginalising tropes that result in silencing of female subjectivities in Head's protagonists. Linked to a critical reading of the novels, this study examines the role of cultural and psychological forces in maintaining patriarchal hegemony, which is based upon hierarchy and domination of women rather than equality. Furthennore, this dissertation suggests that Head's depiction of narrow ethnic and racial bigotry serves a broader etiological purpose of accounting for "the state of thingsff within the South African context. Thus this study oscillates between the abstract constructs and the concrete social experiences within which Bessie Head's literary imagination subsists. In this study, particular attention is paid, in addition to critiques of individual texts, to some of Head's biographical elements with a view on the one hand, to highlighting the moments, events and issues which are reflected as " contexts of her-story" and on the other, to amplifying how Head's formative experiences contribute to her critique of the exploitative racially structured narratives. By using Foucault's theories within the social constructionist model, this dissertation aims to demonstrate the insidious intersections between racism and sexism and how these constructs are implicated in the conception and construction of power. Specifically, this study argues that due to their arbitrary applications, racial and sexual difference be viewed as dynamic and contested, rather than fixed. A synthesis is reached which accords literarure a role within the framework of socio-cultural practice in general. / English Studies / M.A. (English)

The primary intention of this study is to establish the theoretical significance of silence within the sphere of the twentieth-century Southern African novel in English. Clearly a feature of recent writing, silence is less overtly thematised in earlier work. Since relatively little critical and theoretical attention has been paid to silence as a positive phenomenon, however, modes of reading it are sought within the broader sphere of the social sciences, and specifically its tradition of social constructionism. Care is taken to address the pressures of the local context, identified in terms of the postcolonial paradigm as relating to language and to culture. A deliberate theoretical innovation is the renunciation of the trope of penetration in favour of the notion of an interface between intact language-culture systems, given an understanding of culture as existing between subjects in relations of power. Fictional narrative which addresses cross-culturality is thus read as a process of cultural translation, and the volitional deployment of silence as an act of resistance to its power. The significance of language is registered in the use of speech-act theory, in the insistence on meaning as generated in spatially and temporally situated conversation, and in the exploration of the influence of pronominal relations on identity. Emerging from my investigation is a recognition of the measure offered by silence of the autonomy of character as subject, and a corresponding recognition of the constitutive capacity of the reader to site the power of narration amongst the polyphonic voices within the culture of the text. The postcolonial paradigm indicates the need for a regional rather than a national perspective; thus the interfaces considered in the case studies include, in Plaatje's Mhudi, orality and literacy, tribal membership and non-sectarianism, Tswana and English; in Paton's Too Late the Phalarope the private domain and apartheid as public hegemonic discourse, narration as possession, and the tragic as structuring textual relations; and in Head's Maru the constitution of a postcolonial identity that resists and transcends the discursive hostility of racism, and the dislocation, displacement and alienation of exilic refuge from apartheid. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1992.

This study examines representations of Southern African black women in the works' of two male and two female writers. A comparative approach is used to review the ways in which the writers characterise women who labour under intense restrictions in domestic situations, the workplace, and in political contexts. Some representations suggest that women have come to terms with social strictures and have learned to live fulfilled lives despite them. Other representations are contextualised in creative situations in which social roles are re-imagined. In the process, women are removed from conventional object-related gendered positions. These representations suggest that women have the capability to achieve personal transcendence rather than accept the immanence imposed by stereotyped gender relationships and repressive political structures. The suggestion is made that writers can change the image of women by centralising them as active subjects, challenging their exclusion and creating spaces for women to represent themselves / English Studies / M.A. (English)

This study examines representations of Southern African black women in the works' of two male and two female writers. A comparative approach is used to review the ways in which the writers characterise women who labour under intense restrictions in domestic situations, the workplace, and in political contexts. Some representations suggest that women have come to terms with social strictures and have learned to live fulfilled lives despite them. Other representations are contextualised in creative situations in which social roles are re-imagined. In the process, women are removed from conventional object-related gendered positions. These representations suggest that women have the capability to achieve personal transcendence rather than accept the immanence imposed by stereotyped gender relationships and repressive political structures. The suggestion is made that writers can change the image of women by centralising them as active subjects, challenging their exclusion and creating spaces for women to represent themselves / English Studies / M.A. (English)