The problematic postcolonial narrative: Intertextuality and empire in African and Afro-Caribbean fiction and film (Tsitsi Dangarembga, Zimbabwe, J. M. Coetzee, South Africa, Jamaica Kincaid, Antigua)

In this dissertation I examine the role of postcolonial theory in reading texts by writers who challenge constructions of nationalism and identity. Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe), The Lives of Animals by J. M. Coetzee (South Africa), A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua) and the film narratives Wend Kuuni (Burkino Faso), Neria (Zimbabwe), Everyone's Child (Zimbabwe), and Taafe Fanga (Mali) are corresponding texts which, despite their author's disparate origins, share commonalities present in postcolonial narratives. All of these narratives are part of the “post” postcolonial literature that I somewhat arbitrarily date as post 1980. While always difficult to divide literature (especially literature as diverse, multiethnic and multinational as postcolonial literature) into decades, eras, or epochs, there are clear divisions that have emerged over the course of the last fifty or sixty years. One of the central focuses of this dissertation is to identify how the second generation of writers and filmmakers I have gathered complicate and problematize the familiar and standardized elements of early postcolonial theory.; Throughout this study, I use intertextuality as the bridge that displays globalization and the current “cultural conversation” that (again, despite national disparity) is a unifying dialogue occurring over the majority of the globe in ex-colonies. In the first chapter, I consider how intertextuality allows Dangarembga to blend the postcolonial with the modernist argument. In the second chapter, I explicate Kincaid's construction of her text as an anti-guide and show how it challenges ideas of nation formation. The third chapter studies Coetzee's use of metafiction and the fourth chapter examines intertextual feminisms in African cinema. In examining the texts that brought about this dissertation, I intend to show how these writers challenge and displace postcolonial theory and make way for new theories of hybridity.