Head, Bessie

This dissertation provides a literary response to the appropriation of Third-World women's texts by Western feminist discourses. I intend to question the constructed difference between literature and theory. I use the term African woman/women as a construct not of identity but o…

This study explores the ways in which selected fictional narratives by Ayi Kwei Armah, Nuruddin Farah, Bessie Head and Wole Soyinka figure the African world in its postcolonial condition. By "figuration" I mean, after Hayden White, the manner in which a determinate narrative--hi…

In twentieth-century African, African American, and Caribbean literatures, mixed-blood women are often misread as figures frozen in tragic postures. Such unrealistic portraitures replicate the traditional white-authored pathologizations of racial hybridity. Drawing on the theore…

This dissertation asks how Pan-Africanism sustains itself as a nationalism despite the evident, unorthodox temporal and spatial gaps between the individuals, populations and events it claims for its own. In answering this question, I challenge the inadvertently anti-democratic t…