Why is the nation in a postcolonial world so often
seen as a motherland? This pathbreaking study, 'Stories
of women: Gender and narrative in the postcolonial
nation', explores the perenially fascinating
relationship between gender icons and foundational
fictions of the nation in different postcolonial spaces.
The leading critic and theorist of postcolonial writing
Elleke Boehmer's work on the crucial intersections
between independence, nationalism and gender has already
proved canonical in the field. Stories of women combines
her keynote essays on the mother figure and the
postcolonial nation, along with incisive new work on
male autobiography, 'daughter' writers, the colonial
body, the trauma of the postcolony, and the nation in a
transnational context. Focusing on Africa as well as
South Asia, and sexuality as well as gender, Boehmer
offers fine close readings of writers ranging from
Achebe, Okri and Mandela to Arundhati Roy and Yvonne
Vera, shaping these into a critical engagement with
theorists of the nation like Fredric Jameson and Partha
Chatterjee. Moving beyond cynical deconstructions of the
postcolony, the book mounts a bracing reassessment of
the postcolonial nation as a site of potential
empowerment, as a 'paradoxical refuge' in a globalised
world. 'Stories of women' acts on its own impassioned
argument that postcolonial and nation-state studies
address substantively issues hitherto raised chiefly
within international feminism. It is likely to prove a
landmark study in the field. The book will draw interest
from readers and researchers of postcolonial,
international and women's writing; of nation theory,
colonial history and historiography; and of Indian,
African, migrant and diasporic literatures.
|
|