The changing image of women in Francis Imbuga's Oeuvre
- Authors: Oketch, Selline Atieno , West, Mary Eileen
- Date: 2014
- Subjects: Women in literature , Feminist criticism -- Kenya
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , DLitt
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10948/2949 , vital:20373
- Description: The aim of this study was to examine the changing image of women in the oeuvre of Francis Imbuga. Focusing on seven stage plays and two novels published between 1976 and 2011, the study examines the depiction of female characters within the social, cultural and political contexts of post-independence African societies. The depiction of female characters in literature has attracted the attention of numerous scholars globally, particularly with regards to negative female stereotypes in male authored works. This study explores Imbuga’s attitude towards female stereotypes and gender inequalities in literary texts. Using an eclectic framework that includes feminist criticism, feminist stylistics, gender theory and the formal strategies of literature, the study examined gender relations in these texts through the analysis of language and discourse of characters. Further, the study uses the interpretive methods of textual analysis to categorize these works into three phases based on their portrayal of female characters. This method reveals a systematic transformation in the characterization of women from disadvantaged positions in the patriarchal society to more prominent positions in the contemporary society. The study demonstrates that Imbuga makes a positive response to feminism and devices a unique perspective on feminism that celebrates both the domestic and public roles of female characters. In this sense, the female characters contribute to the moral content and aesthetic values of Imbuga’s works. The study concludes that Imbuga views the transformation of female characters in literary texts as part of the broader social change that is desirable in the society. Ultimately, this vision involves shifting focus from the preoccupation with gender inequalities to concern for the welfare and dignity of the human person. Based on the conclusions, recommendations for further study include investigation into the educative and social role of the performing arts as a means of raising consciousness on issues such as HIV/Aids, use of indigenous knowledge in solving contemporary issues, incorporation of African morality and traditions in contemporary literature and a comparative study of Imbuga’s feministic vision with that of other writers.
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- Date Issued: 2014
White women writing white : a study of identity and representation in (post-)apartheid literatures of South Africa
- Authors: West, Mary Eileen
- Date: 2006
- Subjects: South African fiction (English) -- History and criticism , Identity (Psychology)
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , DPhil
- Identifier: vital:8443 , http://hdl.handle.net/10948/442 , South African fiction (English) -- History and criticism , Identity (Psychology)
- Description: This thesis examines aspects of identity and representation using contemporary theories and definitions emerging out of a growing body of work known as whiteness studies. The condition of whiteness as it continues to inform identity politics in post-apartheid South Africa is explored in an analysis of selected texts written by white women, to demonstrate the ways in which whiteness continues to suggest normativity. In reading a representative selection of literatures produced in contemporary South Africa by white women writers, this study aims to illustrate the ambivalence apparent in the interstitial manifestations of emergent reconciliatory gestures that are at odds with residual traces of superiority. A sampling of disparate texts is examined to explore the representations of race and belonging in post-apartheid South Africa in the light of contemporary theories of whiteness which posit it as a powerful and invisible identification. The analysis attempts to plot a continuum from writers who are least, through to those who are most, aware of whiteness as a cultural construct and of their own positionality in relation to the discursive dynamics that inform South African racial politics. A contextualising overview of the terrain of whiteness studies is provided in Chapter One, marking the ideological and theoretical affiliations of this project, and foregrounding the construction of whiteness as an imagined identity in contemporary cultural criticism. It also provides a justification for the selection of the textual material under scrutiny. Chapter Two explores a genre that has been identified as a growing trend in South African fiction: the production of pulp fiction written by white middle-class women. Two such texts are the focus of this chapter, namely, Pamela Jooste’s People like Ourselves (2004) and Susan Mann’s One Tongue Singing (2005), and the complicities and clichés that are characteristic of popular literature are examined. Antjie Krog’s A Change of Tongue (2003) is the focus of Chapter Three. It is examined as a book offering the writer’s personal response to the difficulties of transformation within the first decade of South African democracy. Krog confronts her own defensiveness, her sense of normalcy, and her sense of alienation in relation to multiple encounters with different people. Chapter Four focuses on the journalism of Marianne Thamm. Her role as columnist for the popular women’s magazine, Fairlady is explored, particularly in relation to the inclusion of a contending voice writing against the general tenets of Fairlady. Thamm’s critique of the mores governing bourgeois white womanhood is read in relation to her role as officially sanctioned Court Jester. Her Fairlady columns have been collected in Mental Floss (2002) but the analysis includes selected columns from 2003 to 2005. Echo Location: A Guide to Sea Point for Residents and Visitors (1998) by Karen Press is the focus of Chapter Five. Her work is read as examining a white South African crisis of belonging in relation to the implications of mapping the co-ordinates of whiteness in South Africa. Chapter Six offers a reading of four short stories, written by Nadine Gordimer and Marlene van Niekerk. These stories are juxtaposed to trace an anxious impasse in white responses to suburbia, the place of enactment of white bourgeois mores, which both writers interrogate.
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- Date Issued: 2006