Contemporary African and Caribbean Women's Writing: National Consciousness and Identity

My dissertation, entitled "Contemporary African and Caribbean Women's Writing: National Consciousness and Identity," analyzes representations of national consciousness and identity in contemporary women's writing and argues that national consciousness and identity provide an important corrective to our understanding of the postcolonial novel. The dissertation examines stylistically-distinct works of narrative fiction, and those mixing fiction and nonfiction, written in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by expatriates from Zimbabwe, Senegal, Antigua, and Haiti.;The first chapter introduces and describes a comparative approach that reveals the productive connections between writings of postcolonial African and Caribbean authors. The second chapter investigates challenges to the colonial and patriarchal powers as reflected in Nervous Conditions (1988), Tsitsi Dangarembga's groundbreaking novel on the life of a young girl in Rhodesia, modern Zimbabwe. The third chapter argues that Fatou Diome's Le ventre de l'Atlantique (2003), translated in English in 2006 as The Belly of the Atlantic, probes the relation between migration, selfhood, and community. The fourth chapter takes up A Small Place (1988) by Jamaica Kincaid to examine themes of disillusionment, neocolonialism, racism, corruption, culture and national identity. The final chapter of analysis focuses on Edwidge Danticat's Krik? Krak! (1995) whose narratives offer another understanding of consciousness beyond the "national narrative" that dominated scholarship of the late twentieth century. The conclusion brings into focus postcolonial studies of today, that reframe perspectives on contemporary African and Caribbean women writers, as exemplified by the four authors studied in this dissertation. Much as their male counterparts, they contribute to national discourse. This work also demonstrated how all the writers studied are against gender inequality.