Agency, Voice, and Sense of Self: Re-Writing ‘African’ Women’s Identity

Abstract

OpeningThe theory and practice of contemporary African writing has given new meanings and prominence to the concept of Africanity. One of my concerns is to explain whether being African writer is a question of nationality, race or colour. The notion of Africanity raises obvious issues: can a book be considered African because of its setting, or is it the writer's perspectives and world-view are the defining factors? These questions prompt consideration of the idea of alterity or the politics of difference,1 and of feminist questions regarding the mapping of this.Blunt and Rose's feminist questioning of the mapping of space and difference in relation to Western men and women provides the foundation for my engagement with the literary theorizing of African feminism. However, I do not draw on the element of universalism in Western feminisms and the associated denial of differences/boundaries among women prohibits the possibility of transgression. Rather, I explore how Davies, Ogundipe-Leslie, and Boehmer demonstrate and theorize space and differences in ways are pertinent to African women/feminism, with due acknowledgement of African women's boundary-crossings in the literary texts under review.As already indicated in the above Introduction, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has developed a theory of ?Signification' centres on the existence of African approach to writing and performance signifies in a different manner from which is operative in the Westem/European literary tradition. Gates's theorizing of African folk tales prompts examination of how writing for children signifies to both women and children. By applying aspects of Gates's theory to Kimenye and Macgoye's writing for children, I hope to show how their writing transgresses boundaries through the process of Signifying). Further along below, I delineate the aspects of Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha, and Robert J.C. Young's theorizing inform my framework. While wholly engaging with these literary theories, the combination of writers and their works suggests interweaving of differing theoretical approaches. Hence my own approach is grounded in Zora Neale Hurston's method of going a piece of the way with them,2 and engagement with Mary Louise Pratt's concept of the contact zone, which she defmes as an attempt to invoke the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctives, and whose trajectories now intersect.3 The resultant polyphony of voices enables the contestation of a variety of positions and a multiplicity of readings. To support my arguments, I will be engaging with other current theorists working in the areas of postcolonial literary theory and African feminism.Literary Identity and the African WriterTo echo Kwame Anthony Appiah, it is important to establish from the outset notions surrounding identity are social and cultural constructs.4 Like Appiah, I believe that a biologically-rooted conception of race is both dangerous in practice and misleading in theory: African unity, African identity, need securer foundations than race.5 As with notions surrounding identity, ?race' is also a social construct. Nineteenth- and earfy-twentieth-century European scientific thinking, which specified supposedly distinct biological types, supported and reinforced differences between races.6 Consequently, the concept of race' leads to racial hierarchy because, although it is now discredited as a meaningful biological category, contemporary understandings of ?race' carry the trace of early scientific thinking.7 The notion of differences relating to black people in comparison with white people, for example, are informed by biological and other forms of determinism (intrinsic ability, character) whereby it is assumed the skin you are bom with determines your identity. The problematic nature of the term ?race' thus means it is not valued as analytical category. …