Women as images of history: Contemporary Anglophone fiction by minority and post-colonial women writers

One of the most exciting developments in contemporary world literature is the growth of a vital body of fiction by minority and post-colonial women writers, fiction that seeks to give voice to a previously voiceless past by inscribing those women's undocumented and unacknowledged histories into the lives of representative female characters. In diverse works from the United States, Canada, and New Zealand, for example, Afro-American, Japanese-Canadian, and Maori women are reclaiming their histories by fictively recreating the experiences of minority women in their societies. Similarly, many novels by Third World women draw parallels between their female protagonists' experiences of sexual and/or racial subjugation and the social history of women in Africa, the Caribbean, or India. In creating representative female characters whose experiences embody the history of women in their particular cultures, these writers assert that for minority and Third World women, the reclamation of their history is an act at once of survival and of affirmation, enabling them to define their own identities both as members of their particular ethnic group and as women.; Comparing and contrasting novels by Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, Joy Kogawa, Patricia Grace, Buchi Emecheta, Bessie Head, Zee Edgell, and Kamala Markandaya, my study charts patterns and correspondences among those novels in order to suggest some of the many ways in which minority and post-colonial women writers are defining new directions for the future through the reclamation of their personal and ethnic histories. I conclude that despite their diverse cultural and historical perspectives, these writers all share a common goal: by balancing the white and/or male-centered view of history with the minority or Third World woman's perspective, each writer seeks simultaneously to affirm her culture and to transform it.