7AAEM654 Colonial and Postcolonial Women Writers

Module convenor: Module credit value: Teaching Arrangements: Assessment: Zoe Norridge, [email protected] 20 credits 1 two-hour weekly seminar 1 4000-word essay

Outline
This module examines the intersection of feminism, anti-colonialism and literature from 1880 to the present day. The course pairs colonial and postcolonial women writers from South Africa, the Caribbean, India & Pakistan, New Zealand and Zimbabwe. In alternating between colonial and postcolonial texts we will seek to examine the legacies of colonial literature in contemporary womens fiction and life-writing. The course engages with the recent upsurge in scholarship on women and anti-colonial thought. We will consider the political activism of many of these writers, as well as the ways in which their politics are articulated in their writing, whether fiction or non-fiction. All of these writers, in differing ways, seek to reformulate colonial and postcolonial power relations, placing womens rights at the heart of these debates. Recurring themes include violence, racism, migration, complex identities and cross-cultural empathy. We will examine each text through close-readings alongside discussions of wider literary and theoretical concerns. No prior knowledge of world literature is required.

Primary Texts
South Africa Week One: Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm (1883) Week Two: Antjie Krog, Country of my skull (1998) New Zealand Week Three: Katherine Mansfield, Collected Stories (1911-1923) Week Four: Keri Hulme, The Bone People (1984) Caribbean Week Five: Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (1934) Week Seven: Andrea Levy, Small Island (2004) Zimbabwe Week Eight: Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing (1950) Week Nine: Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions (1988)

India and Pakistan Week Ten: Santha Rama Rau, Home to India (1945) Week Eleven: Kamila Shamsie, Burnt Shadows (2009)

Essential Secondary Reading (provisional)

NB: There may be slight changes to secondary reading at the beginning of term. Most will be available electronically. Week One (Schreiner): Elleke Boehmer. Introduction to Stories of Women. Manchester UP, 2005 Extract from Virginia Woolfs Three Guineas (1938) Carolyn Burdett. Olive Schreiner and the Progress of Feminism. Palgrave, 2001: 17-45 Extracts from Olive Schreiner, Women and Labour (1911) Week Two (Krog): Carli Coetzee. They Never Wept, the Men of My Race: Antjie Krogs Country of My Skull and the White South African Signature. Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol.27, No.4, 2001 Mark Sanders. Introduction to Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid. Duke UP, 2002 Week Three (Mansfield) Mark Williams. Mansfield in Maoriland in Modernism and Empire. Manchester UP, 2000: 249-71 Extracts from Mansfields Urewera Notebook, Ian A. Gordon (ed) Week Four (Hulme) C.K. Stead. Keri Hulmes The Bone People and the Pegasus Award for Maori Literature. Ariel, Vol.16, No.4, 1985 Margery Fee. "Why C.K. Stead didn't like Keri Hulme's the bone people: Who can write as Other?" Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada, 1, 1989: 11-32 Week Five (Rhys) Helen Carr. Jean Rhys: West Indian Intellectual in West Indian Intellectuals in Britain, Bill Schwarz (ed), Manchester UP, 2003: 114-31 Urmila Seshagiri Modernist Ashes, Postcolonial Phoenix. Modernism/modernity, Vol.13, No.3, 2006: 487-505 Week Seven (Levy) Sebnem Toplu. Transnational Identity Mappings in Andrea Levys Fiction in Growing Up Transnational, Identity and Kinship in a Global Era, May Friedman and Silvia Schultermandl (eds), University of Toronto Press, 2011

Sarah Brophy. Entangled Genealogies: White Femininity on the Threshold of Change in Andrea Levys Small Island. Contemporary Womens Writing, Vol.4, Iss.2, 2010:100-113

Week Eight (Lessing) Joy Wang. White Postcolonial Guilt in Doris Lessings The Grass Is Singing. Research in African Literatures, Vol.40, No.3, 2009:37-47 Robin Visel. Then Spoke the Thunder: The Grass is Singing as a Zimbabwean Novel. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Vol.43, No.2, 2008:145-156 Week Nine (Dangarembga) Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (extracts) Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi. Reconstructing Identity and Subjectivity: Buchi Emecheta, Ama Ata Aidoo, Tsitsi Dangarembga. Gender in African Womens Writing, Indianna UP, 1997 Week Ten (Rau) Antoinette Burton. Introduction to The Postcolonial Careers of Santha Rama Rau, Duke 2011: 6-9, 39-44 Amit Chaudhuri. The Alien Face of Cosmopolitanism in The Indian Postcolonial, Routledge, 2011: 281-96 Week Eleven (Shamsie) Michael Rothberg, Introduction to Multidirectional Memory, Stanford UP, 2009 Harleen Singh, A Legacy of Violence: Interview with Kamila Shamsie about Burnt Shadows. Ariel, Vol.42, No.2, 2011

Selected Bibliography
General Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities . London, 1983. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (eds). The Postcolonial Studies Reader . London: Routledge, 1995. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. Routledge: London, 1994. Bhavnani, K. K. (ed). Feminism and Race. Oxford: OUP 2001. Blake, Ann, Gandhi, Leela and Sue Thomas. England Through Colonial Eyes in Twentieth Century Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. Blunt, Alison and Rose, Gillian. Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies . Guilford Press, 1994. Blunt, Alison and Cheryl McEvan eds. Postcolonial Geographies. New York: Continuum, 2002. Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Identities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Boehmer, Elleke. Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005. Booth, Howard and Rigby, Nigel, eds. Modernism and Empire. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Boyce Davies, Carole. Black Women, Writing and Identity. London: Routledge, 1994. Brooker, Peter and Andrew Thacker, eds. Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, cultures, spaces. London: Routledge, 2005. Burton, Antoinette (ed). After the Imperial Turn: Thinking With and Through Nation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. -----. At the Heart of Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1998. -----. Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture 1865-1915. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina 1994 -----. Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home and History in Late Colonial India. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. ----- (ed). Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities. London: Routledge, 1999. Childs, Peter (ed). Post-colonial Theory and English Literature: A Reader. Edinburgh, 1999. Donnell, Alison. Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History, Routledge, 2006. Doyle, Laura and Winkiel, Laura, eds. Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth (Harmondsworth, 1983) -----. Black Skins, White Masks (London, 1986). Gandhi, Leela. Postcolonial Theory . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998.. Gikandi, Simon. Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Hall, Catherine (ed). Cultures of Empire: Colonizers in Britain and the empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters. London, 1992. Katrak, K. H. Politics of the Female Body: Postcolonial Women Writers of the Third World .Rutgers University Press, 2006. Innes, C. L. The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English Cambridge UP 2007.. Innes, C. L. A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain, 1700-2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Lazarus, Neil (ed). The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies (CUP 2004). Lionnet, Francoise. Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. McClintock, Anne et al (eds). Dangerous Liaisons, Gender, Nations and Postcolonial Perspectives University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

McLeod, John (ed). The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies London: Routledge, 2007. Mills, S. and R. Lewis (eds). Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader .Edinburgh UP, 2003. Mohanty, C. T, Russo, A. and Torres, L. (eds). Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism Indiana UP, 1991. Needham, Anuradha Dingwaney. Using the Masters Tools: Resistance and the Literature of the African and South-Asian Diasporas. New York: St. Martins Press, 2000. Rajan, R. S. Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism Routledge, 1993. Schwarz, Henry and Ray, Sangeeta. A Companion to Postcolonial Studies Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Sharpe, Jenny. Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text London, 1993. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds .Routledge 1998. Young, Robert. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London, 1995. Olive Schreiner Berkman, Joyce. The Healing Imagination of Olive Schreiner: Beyond South African Colonialism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989. Burdett, Carolyn. Olive Schreiner and the Progress of Feminism: Evolution, Gender, Empire. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. Chrisman, Laura. Rereading the Imperial Romance: British Imperialism and South African Resistance in Haggard, Schreiner and Plaatje. Oxford: Clarendon, 2000. Clayton, Cherry, ed. Olive Schreiner. Johannesburg: McGraw-Hill, 1983. GoGwilt, Christopher. The Fiction of Geopolitics: afterimages of culture from Wilkie Collins to Alfred Hitchcock. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Hackett, Robin. Sapphic Primitivism: Productions of Race, Class and Sexuality in Key Works of Modern Fiction. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Heilmann, Ann. New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. Horton, Susan R. Difficult women, artful lives: Olive Schreiner and Isak Dinesen, in and out of Africa. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Stanley, Liz. Feminism and Friendship. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985. -----. Imperialism, Labour and the New Woman: Olive Schreiners Social Theory. Durham: Sociologypress, 2002. Vivan, Itala, ed. The Flawed Diamond: Essays on Olive Schreiner. Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1991.

Waterman, David. Disordered Bodies and Disrupted Borders: Representations of Resistance in Modern British Literature. Lanham: University Press of America, 1998. Antjie Krog Carli Coetzee. They Never Wept, the Men of My Race: Antjie Krogs Country of My Skull and the White South African Signature. Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol 27, No 4, 2001. Eleni Coundouriotis. The Dignity of the Unfittest: Victims Stories in South Africa. Human Rights Quarterly, 28, 2006 Paul Gready. Novel Truths: Literature and Truth Commissions. Comparative Literature Studies, 46.1, 2009. Harris, Ashleigh. Accountability, Acknowledgement and the Ethics of Quilting. Antjie Krogs Country of My Skull. Journal of Literary Studies 22.1-2 (2006): 27-53. Giuliana Lund. Healing the Nation: Medicolonial Discourse and the State of Emergency from Apartheid to Truth and Reconciliation. Cultural Critique, No 54, Spring 2003. Sanders, Mark. The Ambiguities of Witnessing, 2007. Scaffer, Kay and Sidonie Smith. Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Katherine Mansfield Bennett, Andrew. Katherine Mansfield. Northcote, 2002. Binckes, Faith. Lines of Engagement: Rhythm, Reproduction, and the Textual Dialogues of Early Modernism. Little Magazines & Modernism: New Approaches, ed. Suzanne W. Churchill and Adam McKible, Ashgate 2007: 21-34 Burgan, Mary. Illness, Gender and Writing: the Case of Katherine Mansfield Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. Daly, Saralyn. Katherine Mansfield. Twayne, 1994. Dunbar, Pamela. Radical Mansfield. Macmillan, 1997. Fullbrook, Kate. Katherine Mansfield. Harvester, 1986. Kaplan, Sydney. Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction. Cornell UP, 1991. Mansfield, Katherine, The Urewera Notebook, ed. Ian A. Gordon, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. Robinson, Roger (ed.). Katherine Mansfield: In From the Margin Louisiana State UP Scott, Margaret (ed.). The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks. University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Smith, Angela. Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: a Public of Two Oxford: Clarendon, 1999. Smith, Angela. Katherine Mansfield: A Literary Life. Palgrave, 2001. Tomalin, Claire. Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life. Viking, 1987.

Williams, Mark. Mansfield in Maoriland: biculturalism, agency and misreading. Modernism and Empire, ed Howard Booth and Nigel Rigby, Manchester UP, 2000: 249-74 Keri Hulme Barker, Clare. From Narrative Prosthesis to Disability Counternarrative: Reading the Politics of Difference in Potiki and the Bone People. Journal of New Zealand Literature, No.24, Part 1, 2006: 130-147. Dever, Maryanne. Violence as lingua franca: Keri Hulmes the bone people, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Volume 29, Issue 2, 1989. Fee, Margery. "Why C.K. Stead didn't like Keri Hulme's the bone people: Who can write as Other?" Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada 1 (1989): 11-32. Sarah Shieff. the bone people: Contexts and Reception, 1984-2004. In The Pain of Unbelonging: Alienation and Identity in Australasian Literature, Sheil Collingwood-Whittick (ed), Rodopi, 2007. Stead, C.K. Keri Hulmes The Bone People and the Pegasus Award for Maori Literature. Ariel, Vol.16, No.4, 1985. Tawake, Sandra Kiser. Reading The Bone People cross-culturally. World Englishes, Volume 12, Issue 3, November 1993. Wenzel, Marita. Liminal Spaces and Imaginary Places in The Bone People by Keri Hulme and The Folly by Ivan Vladislavic. In Beyond the Threshold: Explorations of Liminality in Literature, Hein Viljoen and C.N. Van der Merwe (eds), Peter Lang, 2007, 45-60. Yukie Najita, Susan Fostering a new vision of Maori community: Trauma, history and genealogy in Keri Hulmes The Bone People. Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific: Reading History and Trauma in Contemporary Fiction, Routledge, 2006: 99-129. Jean Rhys Angier, Carole. Jean Rhys Penguin, 1985. -----. Jean Rhys: Life and Work Penguin, 1992. Britzolakis, Christina. This Way to the Exhibition: Genealogies of Urban Spectacle in Jean Rhyss Interwar Fiction. Textual Practice 21.3(2007): 457-82. Burrows, Victoria. Whiteness and Trauma: The Mother/Daughter Knot in the Fiction of Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid and Toni Morrison Palgrave, 2004. Carr, Helen. Jean Rhys Northcote House, 1996. Carr, Helen. Intemperate and Unchaste: Jean Rhys and Caribbean Creole Identity. Women: a cultural review 14.1(2003): 38-62. DellAmico, Carol. Colonialism and the Modernist Moment in the Early Novels of Jean Rhys Routledge, 2005. Emery, Mary Lou. Jean Rhys at Worlds End University of Texas Press, 1990. -----. Modernism, the Visual and Caribbean Literature Cambridge UP, 2007. Frickey, Pierrette (ed.). Critical Perspectives on Jean Rhys Three Continents Press, 1990.

Gregg, Veronica Marie. Jean Rhys Historical Imagination University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Howells, Coral Ann. Jean Rhys Harvester, 1991. Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters London, 1992. Konzett, Delia. Ethnic Modernism Palgrave, 2002. Linett, Maren. New Words, New Everything: Fragmentation and Trauma in Jean Rhys. Twentieth Century Literature 51.4(2005): 437-66. Marshik, Celia. British Modernism and Censorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Maslen, Cathleen. Ferocious Things: Jean Rhys and the Politics of Womens Melancholia. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2009. Maurel, Sylvia. Jean Rhys Macmillan, 1998. Moran, Patricia. Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and the Aesthetics of Trauma Palgrave, 2007. Murdoch, H. Adlai. Rhyss Pieces: Unhomeliness as Arbiter of Caribbean Creolization Callaloo 26.1(2003): 252-272. OConnor, Teresa. Jean Rhys: The West Indian Novels. New York University Press, 1986. Pizzichini, Lillian. The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys. New York: Norton, 2009. Rhys, Jean. Letters 1931-1966. Ed. F. Wyndham Penguin, 1985. Rosenberg, Leah. Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean Literature Palgrave 2007. Savory, Elaine. Jean Rhys, Cambridge UP, 1998. Seshagiri, Urmila. Modernist Ashes, Postcolonial Phoenix: Jean Rhys and the Evolution of the English Novel in the Twentieth Century. Modernism/Modernity 13.3(2006): 487-505. Snaith, Anna. A Savage from the Cannibal Islands: Jean Rhys and London. Geographies of Modernism. Ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker Routledge, 2005. Thacker, Andrew. Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Thomas, Sue. The Worlding of Jean Rhys Greenwood, 1999. Andrea Levy Brophy, Sarah. Entangled Genealogies: White Femininity on the Threshold of Change in Andrea Levys Small Island, Contemporary Womens Writing, Vol.4, Iss.2, 2010:100-113. James, Cynthia. Youll Soon Get Used to Our Language: Language, Parody and West Indian Identity in Andrea Levys Small Island, Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, Vol.5, Iss.1, Article 3, 2007. Lang, Anouk. Reading race in Small Island: discourse deviation, schemata and the textual encounter, Language and Literature, vol.18, no.3, 316-330, 2009.

Perfect, Michael. Fold the paper and pass it on: Historical silences and the contrapuntal in Andrea Levys fiction. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Vol.46, Iss.1, 2010: 31-41. Toplu, Sebnem. Transnational Identity Mappings in Andrea Levys Fiction, Growing Up Transnational, Identity and Kinship in a Global Era, May Friedman and Silvia Schultermandl (eds), University of Toronto Press, 2011. Doris Lesing Bloom, Harold (ed). Doris Lessing, Chelsea House Publishers, 2003. Fishburn, Katherine. The Manichean Allegories of Doris Lessings The Grass is Singing. Research in African Literatures, Vol.25, No.4, Winter 1994: 1-15. Frampton, Edith. Horrors of the Breast: Cultural Boundaries and the Abject in The Grass is Singing, Doris Lessing: Border Crossings, Alice Ridout and Susan Watkins (eds), Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009. Graham, James. An abject land? Remembering women differently in Doris Lessings The Grass is Singing and Chenjerai Hoves Bones. English Studies in Africa, Vol.50, Iss.1, 2007:57-74. Greene, Gayle. Doris Lessing: The Poetics of Change. University of Michigan Press, 1997. Ingersoll, Earl (ed). Doris Lessing: Conversations. Ontario Review Press, 1994. Kaplan, Carey and Ellen Rose, Doris Lessing: the alchemy of survival, Ohio UP, 1988. King, Jeanette. Doris Lessing. Routledge, 1989. Maslen, Elizabeth. Doris Lessing, Northcote House, 1994. Roberts, Sheila. Sites of Paranoia and Taboo: Lessings The Grass is Singing and Gordimers Julys People. Research in African Literatures, Vol.24, No.3, Autumn 1993:73-85. Thorpe, Michael. Doris Lessings Africa. Africana Pub. Co., 1978 Visel, Robin. Then Spoke the Thunder: The Grass is Singing as a Zimbabwean Novel. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Vol.43, No.2, 2008:145156. Wang, Joy. White Postcolonial Guilt in Doris Lessings The Grass Is Singing. Research in African Literatures, Vol.40, No.3, 2009:37-47. Whittaker, Ruth. Doris Lessing. Macmillan Education, 1988. Tsitsi Dangarembga Boehmer, Elleke. Versions of Yearning and Dissent: The Troping of Desire in Yvonne Vera and Tsitsi Dangarembga. Body, Sexuality and Gender, Flora Veit-Wild and Dirk Nagushchewski (eds), Rodopi, 2005. Flockemann, Miki. Not-Quite Insiders and Not-Quite Outsiders: The Process of Womanhood in Beka Lamb, Nervous Conditions and Daughters of Twilight. Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Vol.27, No.2, 1992:37-47. George, Rosemary Marangoly and Helen Scott. An Interview with Tsitsi Dangarembga. NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol.26, No.3, 1993:309-319.

Ranger, Terry. Special Issue of Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol.23, Iss,2, 1997 (a range of articles). Schmidt, Heike. Healing the wounds of war: memories of violence and the making of history in Zimbabwes most recent past. Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol.23, Iss.2, 1997. Flora Veit-Wild. Teachers, Preachers, Non-Believers: A Social History of Zimbabwean Literature. Hans Zell Publishers, 1992. Nfah-Abbenyi, Juliana Makuchi. Reconstructing Identity and Subjectivity: Buchi Emecheta, Ama Ata Aidoo, Tsitsi Dangarembga. Gender in African Womens Writing, Indianna UP, 1997. Willey, Ann Elizabeth and Jeanette Treiber. Negotiating the postcolonial: emerging perspectives on Tsitsi Dangarembga. Africa World Press, 2002. Santha Rama Rau Burton, Antoinette. The Postcolonial Careers of Santha Rama Rau. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. ____ . Cold War Cosmopolitanism: The Education of Santh Rama Rau in the Age of Bandung, 1945-1954. Radical History Review, Issue 95, Spring 2006:149-72. Desai, S. K. Santha Rama Rau. New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1976, Rustomji-Kerns, Roshni. Expatriates, Immigrants and Literature: Three South Asian Women Writers. The Massachusetts Review, Vol.29, No.4, 19889:655-665. Kamila Shamsie Chambers, Claire. A comparative approach to Pakistani fiction in English. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Vol.47, Iss.2, 2011:122-134. Gamal, Ahmed. The global and the postcolonial in post-migratory literature. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2012 (in print, available to preview online). Khan, Gohar Karim. The Hideous Beauty of Bird-Shaped Burns: Transnational Allegory and Feminist Rhetoric in Kamila Shamsies Burnt Shadows. Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies, Vol.3, No.2, 2011:53-68. King, Bruce. Kamila Shamsies novels of history, exile and desire. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Vol.47, Iss.2, 2011:147-158. Singh, Harleen. A Legacy of Violence: Interview with Kamila Shamsie about Burnt Shadows. Ariel, Vol.42, No.2, 2011.

10