Thesiss

This dissertation takes as its point of departure recent work on Orientalism and Africanism which establishes that Europeans have constructed the African in literary and philosophical discourse as Other in opposition to a dominating Western self. It also uses the feminist topos …

Postmodernism and postcolonialism are both offsprings of modernity. To be postmodern does not mean to totally obliterate modernity. In postmodernity, however, the illusions of progress, order, universalism, hegemony, are dissipated. Reason, the very foundation on which modernity…

Through an analysis of works by Francophone and Anglophone sub-Saharan female writers (Mariama Bâ, Ken Bugul, Ntyugwetondo Angèle Rawiri and Ama Ata Aidoo), I examine the various narrative strategies elaborated by African women authors to resist binary oppositions, and to advoca…

Les romancieres senegalaises Nafissatou Niang Diallo, Mariama Ba et Aminata Sow Fall ont suscite des epithetes qui vont de feministe a antifeministe pour caracteriser leur production litteraire. Notre propos est de demontrer qu'une telle lecture est reductrice car il s'agit la d…

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 dissertation investigates four epistolary works by modern women writers of color where the issues of gender, genre, and culture or race interconnect, in the hope of providing a better understanding of how the mode of the unsent/unanswered letter breaks the borderline betwee…

This dissertation uses Bakhtinian intertextuality as a heuristic to read in pairs six contemporary African and Caribbean women's novels. The three dialogues offer alternative literary histories to those of the dominant canons, thus simultaneously constructing and resisting liter…