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Gender and Representing the Unrepresentable

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Contemporary African Literature in English

Abstract

Women’s identities in African literature form a particularly difficult facet of representation due, in large part, to the problem of articulating an intersectional identity in language.1 As Kimberlé Crenshaw has aptly stated, ‘Because of their intersectional identity as both women and of color within discourses shaped to respond to one or the other, women of color are marginalized within both’.2 African women, in other words, are identified as both other by virtue of gender and other by virtue of ethnic identity, two facets which can be neither separated nor treated as equivalent but instead function through a complex relational process. Based in this context, this chapter focuses particularly on the contested space where gender meets ethnic or racial identity,3 that space in which, as Spivak has famously claimed, the subaltern cannot speak. Yet, despite the constant threat of appropriation and assimilation, it should be recalled, as Benita Parry reminds us, that ‘discourses of representation should not be confused with material realities’.4 Rather than viewing feminine subjectivities in African writing as inherently irretrievable, that is to say, an attentive reading remains attuned to the ways in which these identities speak differently, persistently emerging in alternate codes which go beyond the discursive.

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Notes

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English, University of Bristol, UK

    Madhu Krishnan

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© 2014 Madhu Krishnan

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Krishnan, M. (2014). Gender and Representing the Unrepresentable. In: Contemporary African Literature in English. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137378330_4

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