African Women Novelists: Re-Imaging Gender
Edited by Mala Pandurang and Anke Bartels
 
This critical anthology focuses on African women novelists from all over the continent and engages with the wide range of gender-specific issues they prioritize. The revaluation of the early pioneers in this study, is followed by a strong emphasis on the second generation writers and the new concerns and stylistic devices they introduced. The essays problematize the nexus between history and gender in their works which leads not only to a deconstruction of patriarchal narratives but also to a new politics of (self) representation. Equally important in the oeuvre of many of these writers are interrogations of the gendered experience of war and of diaspora and exile. Despite their multiple theoretical and critical frameworks, the contributions to this volume effectively demonstrate how the novelists under discussion offer new visions of shifting gender images from a multiplicity of female subject positions.

 

MALA PANDURANG is Head, Department of English, Dr BMN College, Mumbai, India. She is also a Post -doctoral Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Bonn. She has taught at the University of Texas at Austin as Senior Fulbright Visiting Professor. Her publications include Postcolonial African Fiction: A Crisis of Consciousness (1997), Articulating Gender (ed.) (2000), Vikram Seth: Multiple Locations, Multiple Affiliations (2003), Mediating Indian Writing in English: German Responses (Co-ed.) (2005, 2006). Chinua Achebe:. An Anthology of Recent Criticism (ed.) (2006) and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o: An Anthology of Recent Criticism (ed.) ( 2007).

ANKE BARTELS studied English and German at the Technical University of Braunschweig. After receiving her Ph D, she was a visiting lecturer for German Studies at Strathclyde University in Glasgow. She is currently working on a post-doctoral thesis on East African women writers as well as teaching postcolonial literature and cultural studies at Potsdam University, Germany. Her research interests include contemporary British theatre, feminism, cultural studies and postcolonial literatures.
 
Contributors : James Tar Tsaaior, Michael Wainaina, Evelyn Hongo, Margaret A. Cox, Kanshi Vashist, Ojo Olorunleke, Shreya Bhattacharji, Saheed Aderinto, Kusha Sharma, Ammalu Kutty, Marlene De La Cruz-Guzman, Pauline Dodgson- Katiyo, Jennifer T.Westmoreland Bouchard and Julian Vigo.
 
ISBN 978-81-909416-3-1           2010          216 pp           Rs.600 (hb)