Book Description
This is an analytical survey of the workds of three notable female writers of post-colonial societies: South Africa's nadine Gordimer, India's Nayantara Sahgal, and Nigeria's Buchi Emecheta. The author contents that the three novelistis tend to subsume social and economic categorizations under one dominant mode. For Gordimer, race dictates political identity and behavior; for Sahgal, class determines the appropriateness of political leadership; while for Emecheta, gender power controls and dominates political action. The implications of this for the nature of post-colonial political fiction, according to the author, are that narrative voice and political identity are in a state of flux. The three novelists are articulate and expressive with regard to race, class and gender, and in examining them together, this book shows that the post-colonial woman is part of a plurality or continuum in which she moves in various posittions, depending on what ideology is imposed on and by her. The post-colonial woman is represented as a figure that is being constantly displaced or a oice that perpetually resists within a discourse that is evolving and shifting. She is at once elite and pwoerless, at once subersive and exploitative. This book analyzes the attempts of these three novelists to come to terms with the neo-colonial and patriarchal ideology that surround and limits them.


From the Back Cover
This is an analytical survey of the works of three notable female writers of post-colonial societies: South Africa's Nadine Gordimer, India's Nayantara Sahgal, and Nigeria's Buchi Emecheta. The author contends that the three novelists tend to subsume social and economic categorizations under one dominant mode. For Gordimer, race dictates political identity and behavior; for Sahgal, class determines the appropriateness of political leadership; while for Emecheta, gender power controls and dominates political action. The implications of this for the nature of post-colonial political ficiton, accoridng to the author, are that narrative voice and political identity are in a state of flux. The three novelists are articulate and expressive with regard to race, class and gender, and in examining them together, this book shows that the post-colonial woman is part of a plurality or continuum in which she moves in various positions, depending on what ideology is imposed on and by her. The post-colonial woman is represented as a figure that is being constantly displaced or a voice that perpetually resists within a discourse that is evolving and shifting. She is at once elite and powerless, at once subversive and exploitative. This book analyzes the attempts of these three novelists to come to terms with the neo-colonial and patriarchal ideologies that surround and limit them.


About the Author
Joya Uraizee is assistant professor in the Department of English, St. Louis Univestiy, Missouri. She has contributed to a good number of published works and several presentations and reviews on her primary area of disciplinie, post-colonial literature and theory.


Excerpted from This Is No Place for a Woman : Nadine Gordimer, Nayantara Sahgal, Buchi Emecheta, and the Politics of Gender by Joya F. Uraizee. Copyright © 2000. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
NADINE GORDIMER, NAYANTARA SAHGAL, BUCHI EMECHETA, AND THE POSTCOLONIAL CONDITION - Colonialism was one of the most profound historical encounters to affect more than half of the globe from the sixteenth century onwards. Beginning with the expansionist tendencies of Europe in the late sixteenth century, colonialism was a process of systematic political, economic, cultural, and religious brutalization, dominance, and exploitation, resulting in a complete disintegration of social, political, and economic superstructures in the colonized territories.' In political terms, colonialism meant direct control over a country, including the exploitation of its resources and labor, and a "systematic interference in the capacity of the appropriated culture...to organize its dispensations of power" (McClintock 1994:295). Colonialism was eventually countered with armed or ideological resistance by individual nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. While most of Latin America became politically independent early in the nineteenth century, many of the other nations had to wait until after World War II for flag independence. However, as many historians and literary theorists have pointed out, the centuries-long experience of colonization did not end with the transfer of political power; rather, it was perpetuated by the neo-colonial regimes that followed. In most parts of the colonized world decolonization was followed by the political domination of society by a "national bourgeoisie" that assumed leadership (Ahmad 1992:18) or by what Ngugi wa'Thiong'o calls a "comprador" bourgeoisie (Ngugi 1986:20). Both terms refer to a class of leaders empowered by - and often in a permanent alliance with - the former colonial power. These leaders were "conceived and born by colonialism" and their ideology and power as a group were not in any kind of major conflict with the "money-juggling classes [and]... Wall Street" (Ngugi 1993:64), The results of this were most often disastrous for the former colonies, especially since, as Frantz Fanon has indicated, the former colonized subject did not become a "master [but became]...a slave who has been allowed to assume the attitude of a master" (Fanon 1967:219). Since the neo-colonies of post-1960s Africa, for example, remained under the economic and political control of the West, (Ngugi 1986:4-5), the ruling bourgeoisie in those countries became the "neo-colonial slave drivers of their own peoples". In addition to this, imperialism itself continued to flourish, as Ahmad has shown, under the guise of aggressive capitalism, so that "all zones of capital," whether of the colonizer or of the former colonized, were brought into a "single, integrated market, entirely dominated by this supreme, imperialist power [the United States)" (Ahmad 1992:21). This U.S. domination can, in fact, be called "imperialism-without-colonies," and it has taken distinct forms (military, political, economic and cultural), some of which were concealed and some, half concealed (McClintock 1994:295).' As a result of these new forms of colonialism, the newly-independent "national bourgeois states" were dominated and assimilated by Western capitalist hegemony, which at the same time isolated and disorganized "those poorer countries which had opted out of the system of national-bourgeois states in favor of a non-capitalist form of development" (Ahmad 1992:21).' This meant that the U.S. and the former European colonial powers became wealthier, while - with a few exceptions - their ex-colonies became poorer (McClintock 1994:300). To take some specific examples, both India and Nigeria achieved political independence by the early 1960s and both states also experienced a transfer of power from a Western colonizer to a national bourgeoisie. They became neo-colonial states characterized by sharply divided social classes and enmeshed in a system of economic dependence and underdevelopment. Political and intellectual power was wielded by a small upper class/caste, secure in all the privileges of inheritance and wealth, while the lower classes/castes remained in the same state of ignorance and poverty as they had always been. In literary terms, this led to a complex, hybrid culture - in the case of India, to what Ahmad calls an "unfinished bourgeois project: certain notions of canonicity in tandem with the bourgeois, upper-caste dominance of the nation-state; a notion of classicism part Brahmanical, part borrowed from Europe" (Ahmad 1992:15). In Nigeria, as in other parts of Africa, the comprador bourgeoisie established a culture in which language became the means of "spiritual subjugation" (Ngugi 1986:9), because the language of the former colonial power became dominant in society and was the major means of control (Ngugi 1981:5). In South Africa, however, the case was very different. Here, the colonial power, being what Ahmad and others have called a "settler" colonizer, had the ruling race in the minority until the 1990's. In fact, it could have been called a "break-away settler colony" (McClintock 1994:5) or one which had broken off its original ties with the "Mother Country" (Britain) and, in the process, made its own imperialist tendencies more "recalcitrant" (Ahmad 1992:31) and intractable. Therefore, until the 1991 ballot-box victory for the ANC, South Africa had not undergone decolonization (McClintock 1994:295), and even now the anti-colonial struggle is ongoing. Moreover, the role of socialist forces became more important in this context, because of the close alliance between the ANC and the South African communist Party. This alliance was partly due to the popularity of the ANC among the large proletariat class, a popularity amounting to what Ahmad calls a "political hegemony among the majority of the population"(31).