Rewriting History, Gender, and Genre in Africa and the African Diaspora

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Rewriting History, Gender, and Genre in Africa and the African Diaspora Copyright by Andrea Katherine Hilkovitz 2011 The Dissertation Committee for Andrea Katherine Hilkovitz certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Telling Otherwise: Rewriting History, Gender, and Genre in Africa and the African Diaspora Committee: Alexandra Wettlaufer, Supervisor Jossianna Arroyo-Martinez Neville Hoad Bernth Lindfors Jennifer Wilks Telling Otherwise: Rewriting History, Gender, and Genre in Africa and the African Diaspora by Andrea Katherine Hilkovitz, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2011 Dedication In loving memory of Harley. Acknowledgements I am deeply indebted to my family and friends for their love, patience, and encouragement. I am especially grateful to my husband, Matt, for his unwavering belief in me, his advice and wisdom, and all of the many ways—large and small—in which he cared for me along the way. I am thankful to the many professors, colleagues, and friends at the University of Texas at Austin who supported my development as a scholar and teacher. I am particularly indebted to my dissertation supervisor, Alex Wettlaufer, for her belief in my project. I am also grateful to the Austin Branch of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) for its support in the form of a Doctoral Fellowship to fund my research. I would also like to thank my colleagues at Mount Mary College for their suggestions, their offers of assistance, and especially their friendship. v Telling Otherwise: Rewriting History, Gender, and Genre in Africa and the African Diaspora Publication No._____________ Andrea Katherine Hilkovitz, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2011 Supervisor: Alexandra Wettlaufer ―Telling Otherwise: Rewriting History, Gender, and Genre in Africa and the African Diaspora‖ examines counter-discursive postcolonial rewritings. In my first chapter, ―Re-Writing the Canon,‖ I examine two works that rewrite canonical texts from the European tradition, Jean Rhys‘s retelling of the life of Jane Eyre‘s Bertha in Wide Sargasso Sea and Maryse Condé‘s relocation of Wuthering Heights to the Caribbean in La migration des coeurs. In this chapter, I contend that re-writing functions not only as a response, as a ―writing back‖ to the canon, but as a creative appropriation of and critical engagement with the canonical text and its worldview. My second chapter, ―Re-Storying the Past,‖ examines fictional works that rewrite events from the historical past. The works that I study in this chapter are Assia Djebar‘s recuperation of Algerian women‘s resistance to French vi colonization in L’amour, la fantasia and Edwidge Danticat‘s efforts to reconstruct the 1937 massacre of Haitians under Trujillo in The Farming of Bones. In my third chapter, ―Re-Voicing Slavery,‖ I take for my subject neo-slave narratives that build on and revise the slave narrative genre of the late eighteenth- through early twentieth- centuries. The two works that I examine in this chapter are Sherley Anne Williams‘s Dessa Rose and the poem sequence Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip, based on the 1781 murder of Africans aboard the slave ship Zong. My fourth chapter, ―Re-Membering Gender,‖ examines texts that foreground the processes of re-writing and re-telling, both thematically and structurally, so as to draw attention to the ways in which discourses and identities are constructed. In their attempts to counter masculinist discourses, these works seek to re-inscribe gender into these discourses, a process of re-membering that engenders a radical deconstruction of fixed notions of identity. The works that I read in this chapter include Daniel Maximin‘s L’Isolé soleil, which privileges the feminine and the multiple in opposition to patriarchal notions of single origins and authoritative narrative voices and Maryse Condé‘s Traversée de la Mangrove, which rewrites Patrick Chamoiseau‘s novel Solibo Magnifique so as to critique the exclusive nature of Caribbean identity in his notion of créolité. vii Table of Contents Introduction: Telling Otherwise ...............................................................................1 Chapter One: Re-Writing the Canon ......................................................................20 Re-righting Jane Eyre: Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea ...............................29 Caribbeanizing Brontë: Maryse Condé's La migration des coeurs ..............40 Chapter Two: Re-Storying the Past .......................................................................54 Writing/Righting History: Assia Djebar's L'amour, la fantasia ...................58 Re-membering el trujillato: Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones .....67 Chapter Three: Re-Voicing Slavery.......................................................................87 Signifyin' Slavery: Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose ............................90 Un-telling the Slave Trade: M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong! ...........................113 Chapter Four: Re-Membering Gender .................................................................125 Engendering Antillanité: Daniel Maximin's L'Isolé soleil ..........................130 Critiquing Créolité: Maryse Condé's Traversée de la Mangrove ...............145 Conclusion ...........................................................................................................171 Bibliography ........................................................................................................175 Vita ....................................................................................................................196 viii Introduction: Telling Otherwise This study emerged as a result of my ongoing interest in rewriting as both process and product. I have long been fascinated by rewriting, translation, appropriation, and other modes of intertextuality. Beginning with undergraduate research on Samuel Beckett‘s self-translations, continuing with a Master‘s Report on African women‘s Bildungsromane, and culminating in this dissertation project on rewriting in Africa and the African diaspora, my research interests to date share the connective thread of examining rewriting as the creative engagement of texts and traditions. This project seeks to extend and expand upon that interest by examining the poetics and politics of rewriting in Africa and the African diaspora. In postcolonial discourse, rewriting is often associated with the theoretical approach toward the study of postcolonial literatures suggested by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin in their seminal work The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (1989). Using Salman Rushdie‘s phrasing,1 Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin assert that postcolonial rewritings can be understood according to a model by which the ―‗Empire writes back‘ to the imperial ‗centre.‘‖2 In their formulation, writers rewrite canonical 1 See Salman Rushdie, "The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance," London Times July 3 1982: 461. 2 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002) 32. 1 works ―with a view to restructuring European ‗realities‘ in post-colonial terms, not simply by reversing the hierarchical order, but by interrogating the philosophical assumptions on which that order was based‖ (32). In this sense, postcolonial rewritings of canonical texts can be understood as a form of counter- discourse, as it is defined by Richard Terdiman. According to Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, ―a discourse such as post-colonialism, which runs ‗counter‘ to the established canon…, can very readily appropriate from Terdiman the idea that the sign obtains its meaning in conflict and contradiction‖ (167). For the writers of The Empire Writes Back, Terdiman‘s conception of counter-discourse has important applications for postcolonial theory. It ―suggests that ‗no discourse is ever a monologue…it always presupposes a horizon of competing, contrary utterances against which is asserts its own energies‘‖ (167). As a result, discourses are understood to ―come into being in a structure of counter-discursive practices,‖ so that ―‗the inscription of conflict is no longer conceived as a contamination of the linguistic but as its properly defining function‘‖ (167). The brief gloss of Terdiman‘s notion of counter-discourse provided by Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin in The Empire Writes Back is a bit too enthusiastic, however, in that it fails to acknowledge Terdiman‘s sense of the limitations of counter-discourse. In Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France, Terdiman says that, by definition, ―counter-discourses are always interlocked with the domination they 2 contest.‖3 Therefore, ―their footing is never equal‖ (18). As a result, Terdiman states that he has ―a certain modesty about the claims which might be made for the counter-discursive‖ (17) and explains that his ―celebration of their power…remains measured‖ (19). Since the publication of The Empire Writes Back more than twenty years ago, the notion of rewriting the literary canon from the perspective of the colonized has become one of the fundamental assumptions of postcolonial literary scholarship. Quoting Tiffin, Laura E. Ciolkowski notes that there exists ―a postcolonial literary tradition that is specifically interested in rewriting the fictions of…empire‖:
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