Confining Spaces, Resistant Subjectivities

Toward a Metachronous Discourse of Literary Mapping and Transformation in Postcolonial Women’s Writing
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4438-5985-1
Verlag: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Buch, Englisch, 232 Seiten

This book represents a significant contribution to academic knowledge, making a compelling case for a contemporary analytical re-reading of a number of “core” postcolonial women’s narratives, such as Erna Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood, and Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter. These narratives highlight diversity, contextuality, opposition, and metachrony, have a “generative literary function”, and anticipate what have now become postcolonial feminist issues and debates. Bringing together feminist writing from a range of postcolonial contexts, the book contributes to a field represented by the critical writings of Francoise Lionnet, Ketu Katrak, and Elleke Boehmer, among others.

The deconstructive, cultural approach of the book is mobilised to support an in-depth literary analysis which focuses on female oppression, difference, voice, and agency. Questions of what it means to be “a woman” and to be “postcolonial” are read as central debates which emphasise “multi-vocal and multi-focal” female narratives and perspectives. That is, they highlight the temporal, as well as cross-cultural links and implications of the selected narratives, which give the project a kind of positive complexity and linkage.

Above all, the analysis of several unconventional modes and (physical/imaginative) spaces of female resistance, such as prison, widow confinement, and madness, yields some surprising results that are sustained by a close reading of the texts which are not only attentive to questions of genre, structure, imagery and narrative endings, but also oppositional, instructive and reconstructive.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hamam, Kinana

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Postkoloniale Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literatursoziologie, Gender Studies
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik

Über Autor(innen)

Hamam, Kinana
Dr Kinana Hamam is a researcher in postcolonial studies and English literature, with a focus on postcolonial women’s writing. Dr Hamam holds a PhD in Critical Theory (2013) and an MA in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies (2008), both awarded by the University of Nottingham. Hamam has also been an accredited bilingual translator/interpreter of English–Arabic since 2008, and has worked as a full-time Lecturer of English Language and Literature in Syria since 2004. Her research interests include postcolonial cultural studies, especially postcolonial women's writing which foregrounds a metachronous discourse of literary-spatial mapping and transformation; the study of female subalternity and difference in relation to deconstruction and contextuality; and the intersectionality of gender identity, voice, and language in postcolonial (con)texts.

Dr Kinana Hamam is a researcher in postcolonial studies and English literature, with a focus on postcolonial women’s writing. Dr Hamam holds a PhD in Critical Theory (2013) and an MA in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies (2008), both awarded by the University of Nottingham. Hamam has also been an accredited bilingual translator/interpreter of English–Arabic since 2008, and has worked as a full-time Lecturer of English Language and Literature in Syria since 2004. Her research interests include postcolonial cultural studies, especially postcolonial women's writing which foregrounds a metachronous discourse of literary-spatial mapping and transformation; the study of female subalternity and difference in relation to deconstruction and contextuality; and the intersectionality of gender identity, voice, and language in postcolonial (con)texts.