Explorations in geography, gender and genre: Decolonizing women's novels of development (Jean Rhys, Dominica, Michelle Cliff, Jamaica, Nadine Gordimer, South Africa, Doris Lessing, Zimbabwe)

This study compares twentieth-century novels written by women from two geographical sites of British colonialism--Southern Africa (Nadine Gordimer, Doris Lessing) and the Caribbean (Jean Rhys, Michelle Cliff)--in order to demonstrate how, through the interactions of gender, genre, and geography, these texts enact the struggle for decolonization on literary and political levels. Feminist theorists have explored the ways in which women's novels of development re-shape traditional bildungsroman conventions. This consideration of post-colonial women's novels of development adds a geopolitical perspective to these gender and genre studies.; The theoretical framework of this study is based on a discussion of such terms as "post-colonial," "home," "exile," and "nomadism," in which the contributions of critics such as Fredric Jameson, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Chandra Mohanty, and Adrienne Rich, are assessed and compared. The women novelists portray their protagonists as negotiating a path between two cultures, imperial and indigenous, which necessitates a re-mapping of the conventional definitions of home and exile. The analysis also explores both the common ground and the radical differences between the theoretical assumptions of post-structuralism, postmodernism, and post-colonialism.; The introduction argues that the journeys undertaken by the female protagonists in these texts are conscious reversals of the European novels' appropriative forays from the British imperial center to the colonial peripheries. These literary voyages of discovery expose the "heart of darkness" at the center of imperial culture. Barbara Harlow's phrase, "narratives of resistance," is thus an appropriate term for these novels, which embody attempts by the writers to resist the hegemony of social, political, and literary European traditions. Chapters two through five present analyses of the novels as literary projects of decolonization: Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark and Wide Sargasso Sea; Doris Lessing's five-part "Children of Violence" series; Michelle Cliff's Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven; and Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter. This study demonstrates how these texts present the "double consciousness" of the female post-colonial subject in a hybrid narrative form, thereby also portraying the project of cultural synthesis necessary for the post-colonial world.