Description
Book SynopsisWhy is the nation in a postcolonial world so often seen as a motherland? Stories of women is a pathbreaking study of the perenially fascinating relationship between foundational fictions of the nation and gendered images. The book focuses critically on postcolonial spaces ranging from West Africa to India. -- .
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
Introduction
1. Theorising the en-gendered nation: Motherlands, mothers and nationalist sons
2. 'The master's dance to the master's voice': Revolutionary nationalism and women's representation in Ngugi wa Thiong'o
3. Of goddesses and stories: Gender and a new politics in Achebe
4. The hero's story: The male leader's autobiography and the syntax of postcolonial nationalism
5. Stories of women and mothers: Gender and nationalism in the early fiction of Flora Nwapa
6. Daughters of the house: The adolescent girl and the nation
7. Transfiguring: colonial body into postcolonial narrative
8. The nation as metaphor: Ben Okri, Chenjerai Hove, Dambudzo Marechera
9. East is East: where postcolonialism is neo-orientalist - the cases of Sarojini Naidu and Arundhati Roy
10. Tropes of yearning and dissent: The inflection of desire in Yvonne Vera and Tsitsi Dangarembga
11. Beside the West: postcolonial women writers in a transnational frame
12. Conclusion: Defining the nation differently
