Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2008. / "... in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History." Discipline: History; Department/School: History.

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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,...

Thesis (M.A (Psychology))--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Humanities, 2016. / The purpose of the research was to explore issues of identity amongst young, English speaking black middle class women focusing on belonging and alienation. Qualitative research using narrative interviews was conducted with 10 middle class women, aged between 20 and 35 years, who were among the first cohort of black children to attend model C schools at the end of the apartheid era and be taught in English. Several themes and findings were identified, starting with the multigenerational influence on the journey into being assimilated into the English language and culture. Grandmothers and parents experienced tensions between loss of indigenous languages and gaining class mobility for their daughters. Participants also unpacked their journeys of being assimilated into the English language and whiteness and the traumatic experiences they went through as their childhoods were racialised and they became positioned as inferior black people. These traumatic experiences of race continued into their adulthood and intersected with gender, class and language, as the women were positioned as ‘cultural clones’ in the workplace. Language also influenced the women’s intimate relationships as they positioned English speaking male partners as providers and therefore potential life partners. Issues of hair and skin colour were also found to be significant identity markers through insertion into western culture through language, and blackness is actively redefined, resisted and reclaimed. This shows how our identities are fragmented and fluid, allowing the women to experience multiple identities and make them work. The women experience tensions between the loss of their mother tongue and culture, and the positive gains of class mobility that they attribute almost solely to their adoption of the English language as their primary (or only) language of communication. They are alienated from their communities because of their immersion into English and western culture but they are actively generating a new sense of belonging and identity within a new imagined community of English speaking black middle class women / GR2017

This thesis aims to allow the meanings engendered by various black hairstyle choices to emerge as discursive texts with which to further explore issues of black identity in post-apartheid South Africa. It seeks to identify what, if any, new discursive spaces and possibilities are operational in the post-apartheid capitalist context, and how identities are moulded by, and in tum, influence these possibilities. Operating within a discourse analytic approach, this research did not intend to establish fixed and generalisable notions of identity, but by unpacking the discursive baggage attached to historically loaded subjectivities it is concerned with reflecting identity as an ongoing and reflexive project. Entailing a diverse selection of texts, the analysis includes self-generated texts (stemming from interviews, a focus group and participant observation), and public domain texts (stemming from online and print media articles). Chapters 5 - 9 constitute the textual analysis. Using a consumer hair care product as a text, chapter 5 serves as an introduction to discourses surrounding black hair as a variously constructed object. This focus is concerned, more specifically, with the construction of black hair as a 'natural' object in chapter 6. Chapter 7 examines black hair gemonies and the " problematic classification and de/classification of class and consumer identities. Discourses pertaining to the construction and positioning of gendered and sexual subjectivities are explored in chapter 8. Finally, chapter 9 is concerned with the operations of discourses as they function to construct essentialised or hybrid conceptions of identity. The implications for black identity construction in post-apartheid South Africa are discussed in chapter 10 alongside a deconstruction of the research method and researcher positioning.