Rites of Passage in Postcolonial Women's Writing

Erscheinungsjahr 2010
ISBN: 978-90-420-2935-4
Verlag: Brill | Rodopi

Buch, Englisch, Band 123, 307 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 653 g

Reihe: Cross/Cultures

This volume brings a variety of new approaches and contexts to modern and contemporary women’s writing. Contributors include both new and well-established scholars from Europe, Australia, the USA, and the Caribbean. Their essays draw on, adapt, and challenge anthropological perspectives on rites of passage derived from the work of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner. Collectively, the essays suggest that women’s writing and women’s experiences from diverse cultures go beyond any straightforward notion of a threefold structure of separation, transition, and incorporation. Some essays include discussion of traditional rites of passage such as birth, motherhood, marriage, death, and bereavement; others are interested in exploring less traditional, more fluid, and/or problematic rites such as abortion, living with HIV/AIDS, and coming into political consciousness. Contributors seek ways of linking writing on rites of passage to feminist, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic theories which foreground margins, borders, and the outsider.
The three opening essays explore the work of the Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera, whose groundbreaking work explored taboo subjects such as infanticide and incest. A wide range of other essays focus on writers from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Europe, including Jean Rhys, Bharati Mukherjee, Arundhati Roy, Jean Arasanayagam, Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, and Eva Sallis.
Rites of Passage in Postcolonial Women’s Writing will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of postcolonial and modern and contemporary women’s writing, and to students on literature and women’s studies courses who want to study women’s writing from a cross-cultural perspective and from different theoretical positions.

Contributors: Lizzy Attree, Lopamudra Basu, Katrin Berndt, Gay Breyley, Helen Cousins, Tanya Dalziell, Alexandra Dumitrescu, Anna Gething, Jessica Gildersleeve, Sharanya Jayawickrama, Kimberley M. Jew, Polina Mackay, Alexandra W. Schultheis, Rachel Slater, Irene Visser.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Weitere Mitwirkende

Dodgson-Katiyo, Pauline

Wisker, Gina

Fachgebiete

• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Kulturwissenschaften
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Postkoloniale Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements
Introduction: Rites of Passage in Postcolonial Women’s Writing
Africa
Katrin Berndt: A State of Transition: Connotations of Pregnancy in Yvonne Vera’s Without a Name and Butterfly Burning
Helen Cousins: Nothing Like Motherhood: Barrenness, Abortion, and Infanticide in Yvonne Vera’s Fiction
Alexandra W. Schultheis: Mourning and the Angel of History: Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins
Lizzy Attree: Women Writing AIDS in South Africa and Zimbabwe
Americas
Kimberly M. Jew: Reclaiming Ritual: Feminist and Postcolonial Perspectives in Two Plays by Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl
Polina Mackay: “There are no harmless ways to remake oneself”: Re-Invention of Self in Bharati Mukherjee
Asia
Lopamudra Basu: Mourning and Motherhood: Transforming Loss in Representations of Adivasi Mothers in Mahasweta Devi’s Short Stories
Alexandra Dumitrescu: Intimations of Metamodernism: Innocence and Experience in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things
Sharanya Jayawickrama: “No one knows that I have magic / In my brain”: Jean Arasanayagam’s Writing and Re-writing as Rites of Passage
Australia
Gay Breyley: “A Ticket to Nowhere”: Coming-of-Age in Two Twentieth-Century Indigenous Australian Memoirs
Rachel Slater: Transitions: Rites of Passage as Border Crossings in Contemporary Australian Women’s Fiction
Cross-Continental
Jessica Gildersleeve: Muddy Death: Fate, Femininity, and Mourning in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight
Tanya Dalziell: Coming-of-Age, Coming to Mourning: Purple Hibiscus, Lucy, and Nervous Conditions
Anna Gething: Menstrual Metamorphosis and “the foreign country of femaleness”: Kate Grenville and Jamaica Kincaid
Irene Visser: Words Against Death: Rites of Passage in Ana Castillo’s So Far From God and Patricia Grace’s Baby No-Eyes
Notes on Contributors

Über Autor(innen)

Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo is Head of Humanities at Sheffield Hallam University. Her research focus is on African literature (particularly Zimbabwean), contemporary women’s writing, and postcolonial cinemas. Gina Wisker is Professor of Higher Education and Contemporary Literature at the University of Brighton, where she teaches literature, is the head of the centre for learning and teaching, and pursues her research interests in postcolonial women’s writing.