Transnational feminist agency in African and Afro-diasporic fiction and film

This study engages the African and Afro-diasporic narratives of Nigeria's Chimamanda Adichie, Zimbabwe's Tsitsi Dangarembga and Haiti's Edwidge Danticat. It produces a literary response to three discourses concerning African and Afro-disporic women: Euro western discourses that portray them as helpless and docile victims of female oppression; the silence and absence of women's voices in African and Afro-diasporic literary scholarship; and African feminist discourses that claim that citing patriarchy as a main source of female oppression is westocentric and it robs African women of agency. This study starts off by outlining the value of such an inquiry to feminist literary scholarship, introducing the authors and accounting for their selection in this study. Chapters two and three focus on Adichie's Purple Hibiscus (2003) and Half of Yellow Sun (2006), investigating the portrayal of the agency of female characters. The chapters engage current debates in transnational women's and feminist discourses. At the same time, I offer my own definition of agency in the context of the narratives under study. Chapter four and five analyze the portrayal of women's agency in Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions (1988) and Neria (1993), engaging African feminist debates on patriarchy. I define the African market as a public space that African women are exhibiting agency against patriarchal oppression. Chapter 6 utilizes Danticat's employment of imagery and symbolism to trace the portrayal of agency in Breath, Eyes, Memory (1993). The conclusion highlights the major findings of the research, illustrating their value and limitations. This study is a literary intervention aimed at illustrating the importance of feminist literary scholarship that links theory with praxis in the reading of African and Afro-diasporic feminist agency. It seeks to illustrate the diversity of woman as a category, prioritizing a comparative, subject-centered approach to investigating agency of the fictional women of the narratives under study.