DECONSTRUCTING MASCULINITIES, FEMINIST RECONSTRUCTIONS

Abstract

The non-inscription of women in the process of forming national identities in anticolonial discourse is often constructed on differential and hierarchical polarizations which engender counter-productive identities of women in the African postcolonies. This exclusion privileges skewed monologues of masculine iconographies which have political and positional resonances in the identification of women. African women writers, however, engage in contesting the sociocultural and ideological structures that engender their occlusion from the important sites of nationhood, national literary canons and identities. The critical parameters of this study, therefore, emerge from an investigation of the postcolonial context of the possibilities of reconfiguring modern African political and literary discourse, suggesting in its process a displacement of the assumptive traditional, masculinist ethos and the inauguration and reconstruction of a more inclusive sociocultural order. A beginning point in this process requires a critique of existing masculinist hegemonies prevalent in African literature. This is typified by Nigerian female writer Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo in her novel The Last of the Strong Ones (1996). This novel provides the linchpin for the critique of and opposition to the fetishization of oppressive tradition found in much postcolonial writing. The dual process of the reconstruction of new self-images of women and the deconstruction of masculinities is the two-hander structure of this study.