Place-ing postcolonial identity in contemporary literature by women

This project focuses on the identity of the Anglophone postcolonial location in M. Nourbese Philip's Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence (1991), Grace Nichols' I is a Long-Memoried Woman (1983), Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997). With the dissolution of the British Empire as its historical context, the central premises of this project hold, first, that the operative power dynamics characteristic of decolonization are place-specific manifestations of social, cultural, political, historical, and economic discourses and, also, that these power dynamics, particularly in the ways the individuals and groups living in a place interact with them, shape the numerous identities that a given place can signify. Moreover, these power dynamics, while always circumscribed, are forceful in their positioning of people in certain roles and yet also vulnerable to alteration as people collude with and/or resist the asymmetrical relations that characterize/-d the (post)colonial encounter.; Each of the project's four chapters engages with these primary premises in unique ways. The first chapter concentrates on how Philip's volume re-conceptualizes language's meaning-making functions so as to highlight the potential for the co-existence of multiple senses of place, identities, and histories. The second chapter foregrounds how the slave women in Nichols' poems construct, among other things, a new sense of "place" in the New World that denaturalizes the colonizers' power. The third chapter explores how Rhys's novel forwards a conception of identity's relationship to place as a shifting and provisional process that varies according to context and to an individual's or a group's social position. Finally, the fourth chapter on Roy's novel examines the impact of global and local discourses on the potential for a resistant though limited agency.