Negotiating public and private identities: A study of the autobiographies of african women politicians

[摘要] ENGLISH SUMMARY: This thesis examines autobiographies and memoirs of fifteen African women politicians and former politicians. These autobiographies are considered as part of a distinct sub-genre: African political autobiographies by women. Specifically, it interrogates how the African woman's political autobiography represents the public and private subjective identities of African political womanhood. My argument is that the African woman's political autobiography is a site where public and private conceptions of African political womanhood are (de)constructed. In reading these texts, I focus on how a merger between (Western) modes of narration prevalent in traditional (and masculine) autobiography and African narrative techniques drawn from women's narrative practices in oral, visual, and written traditions (re)conceptualise the writers' identities. The women writers' discourses challenge the construction of womanhood in dominant ideological discourses like slavery, colonialism, apartheid, patriarchy, and religion, among others. These writings and my reading of them enter into conversation with African womanist (autobiographical) identity politics. In other words, I place African womanist perspectives of writers like Mary Modupe Kolawole and Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi in conversation with the women-defined practices voiced in these autobiographies in order to suggest ways of reading and writing the African woman's political autobiography. These debates allow us to consider how discursive practices as sites of knowledge production generate conceptions of African political womanhood that either silence or make visible African women's political agency. The study finds that hybridity of the African woman's political autobiography, its subject, and its discourse are in-between spaces from where the writers contest Western and patriarchal notions of womanhood that silence women's agency.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University