Signifying structures: Representations of the house in African-American and Black southern African women's writing

Houses are highly politicized sites in the United States and Southern Africa, where respective histories of colonialism, slavery, and racial segregation not only fostered the predominance of Eurocentric domestic ideals but also established unsafe publics and restricted access to fair, equal accommodations for people of African descent. In the latter half of the twentieth century, African-American and black Southern African women writers responded to dominant depictions of the home place by co-opting houses as critical instruments in their narratives. The houses were used as a means by which to resist racial oppression and patriarchal domination. Drawing upon the complex histories of houses in southern Africa and the United States and the distinct ways in which black women writers use houses as narrative strategies, this study examines the representation of houses in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Fatima Dike's So What's New? and Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun.More specifically, using black feminist thought as a theoretical framework, this study compares and contrasts the manner in which select black women writers construct houses as reflections of black female progress, black female identity, and black female power.The study contributes to existing scholarship on the subject of houses in Anglophone literature by critically analyzing the overlooked topic of the subversive value of houses in black women's writing. Additionally, the study contributes to considerations of black feminist thought by shifting the focus of attention from metaphors connoting movement to one that implies a place of being, the house. Finally, the study contributes to existing scholarship on Beloved, Nervous Conditions, A Raisin in the Sun, and So What's New? by advancing a prolonged focus strictly on the manner in which houses perform in relation to their black female occupants.