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Narrating Selves: Alterity and Simultaneity

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Narrating Selves: Alterity and Simultaneity DISSERTATION TITLE: NARRATING SELVES: ALTERITY AND SIMULTANEITY IN LUTANGA SHABA’S SECRET OF A WOMAN’S SOUL, PETER GODWIN’S MUKIWA: A WHITE BOY IN AFRICA, NELSON MANDELA’S LONG WALK TO FREEDOM AND BARACK OBAMA’S DREAMS FROM MY FATHER BY TAFARA MOYO Submitted in accordance with the requirements for DEGREE OF MASTER IN AFRICAN AND DIASPORAN LITERATURE SUPERVISOR: DOCTOR TASIYANA JAVANGWE i DECLARATION Formatted: Font: Bold I Tafara Moyo, registration number R14216A, hereby declare that this thesis is my own original work ,has not been submitted for any degree or examination at any other university,and that the sources I have used have been fully acknowledged by complete references. This thesis is submitted in partial fulfillment of the Masters of African and diasporan literature Degree in the Department of English and Communication at the Midlands State University. Signature……………………….Date……………. ii ABSTRACT Formatted: Font: Bold This study is an analysis of auto-biographical narratives reinterpreted as auto-heterobiography to open space to an exploration and interrogation of alterity. Analysis of these narratives operated via postmodernist, postcolonial and philosophical discourses.The problem of narrating traumatized, political and hybrid or cosmopolitan selves was sited as resident in the primordial polytropos of the human experience which exposes narratives as aporetic and incomplete once postured as closed or as metanarratives.This study concluded that narratives ultimately assume a paradoxical stance which neither opposes nor accedes to auto-heterobiographical narratives as possible or impossible.The narratives analysed posed the human experience as marked by ambiguity, heteroglossia, polyphony and ambivalence, thus compelling the conclusion that no experience is knowable via a single version of narration.This study posed alterity as both an affirmation and a question of the question of originary, unified and coherent selves. iii KEY TERMS Ambiguity Ambivalence Autobiography Alterity Auto-heterobiography Cosmopolitanism Diaspora Exteriority Heteroglossia Hybrid/hybridity Interiority Metanarrative Memory/memorial/memorialization Narrative/narrativity/narrativization Obligation Ontology iv Polytropos Responsibility Simultaneity v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Formatted: Font: Bold This study was made possible by the inestimable supervision of Dr T. Javangwe of the Englsh and Communication department at the Midlands State University.I also extend my gratitude to Noureen Gondwe who did most of the typing. This study is dedicated to my mother Dorcas. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Formatted: Font: Bold CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………………….. …...1 1.1 Area of study……………………………………………………………………………….….. 1 1.2 Research objectives…………………………………………………………………………... 1 1.3 Statement of the problem…………………………………………………………………..….. 2 1.4 Justification of the study……………………………………………………………………..… 3 1.5 Literature review…………………………………………………………………………….. 4 1.6 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………. .759 1.7 Chapter delineation................................................................................................................ ..759 CHAPTER 2 Formatted: Font: Bold NARRATIVES OF TRAUMA AND TRANSCENDACE: PARADOX AND vii AMBIGUITY IN LIVED EXPERIENCE 2.1 Unstable storied selves: The paradox of impossible possible/aporetic narratives…………. 8771 2.2 The simultaneity of the present and absent sovereignity: The secret and the lie in human experience………………………………………………………………………..... 8892 2.3 Biopolitics as challenge to the self`s severeignity…………………………………………. 114 2.4 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………. 12618 CHAPTER 3 Formatted: Font: Bold POLITICAL DISCOURSES: INVENTING THE SELF AND NATION 3.1 The enlightenment self as arbiter and adjudicator: Bifurcated/bifurcating Discourses …………………………………………………………………………………….. 1226 3.2 Monuments and memorials: staging the self and group via sites of memory……………… 13026 3.3 Landscaping identities: Can death and memorials transcend mortality and forgetting ………………………………………………………………………………..…. 1304 viii 3.4 Multiple significations: Memorial Polyvalence ………………………………………….… 1384 3.5 The self as amanuensis: The souvenir and museum ……………………………………..…. 1439 3.6 Inventing political selves: cultural and historical counter discourses ……………………... 1540 3.7 Perfoming national identity: Insurgency via song and dance…………………………….. .. 15760 3.8 Narrativisations: Inventing history and nation…………………………………………….. 159 3.9 Contradictory vocations: masking and perfoming identity ……………………………… .. 1704 3.10 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………..... 1783 CHAPTER 4 COSMOPOLITAN SPACES: HYBRID IDENTITIES AND QUESTIONS OF HOSPITALITY 4.1 Traversing the vernacular: Cosmopolitanism as hybrid space ……………………………. 1796 4.2 The hybrid self: Sites and images of hospitality …………………………………………... 19086 ix 4.3 Aporia and Antinomies ……………………………………………………………………. 1973 4.5 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………. 2094 Formatted: Font: Bold CONCLUSION SELF INVENTION AS POLYTROPOS: DEPATURES FROM FIXED/FIXATING ONTOLOGIES AND IDENTITIES……………………….……. 206210 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………………….. 2148 x CHAPTER ONE: Introduction Area of study This study explores ethical, identity and political issues in autobiography, largely focusing on heterobiography. Derrida (2004) deploys heterobiography to denote the writing of multiplicities of selves resident in a single individual, selves other than selves in the individual, multiple aporetic orders of Formatted: Justified, Line spacing: Double 1 meaning and genre in self life writing. Hence I will designate my focus as auto- heterobiography. Autobiography as a genre defies any single canonical definition. It can however be referred to as “a literary genre [that] signifies a retrospective narrative that undertakes to tell the author`s own story” (Schwalm, 2014:1). Auto-heterobiography, implicated in ethical issues (Eakin, 2004:3) collapses the narrative boundary between first and third person narrative forms as it views the self as other. This also means the self tells the biographies of others (Kormann 2004, Coetzee, 2011). Heterobiography implies alterity, otherness, in terms of possibility, other being, identity or meaning. Hetero suggests many; hence identity and meaning are simultaneous presences as opposed to singular presence. Thus being or identity is marked by ambivalence and ambiguity in that they refuse being packaged in essentializing or homogenizing epistemes. Research Objectives • To define autobiography and heterobiography • To explain the political and ethical issues in autobiography in relation to black authored gendered narratives as well as cosmopolitan narratives. • Recommendation of the ethical implication of auto-heterobiography is given. Statement of the problem 1 Autobiography has largely privileged self writing as the story of the self especially the elitist self (Huddart 2005:18). In this form it tends to promote a universalizing and homogenizing project from which the Other as person, gender and identity is subordinated or altogether erased (Anderson 2001: 13). Autobiography largely retrieves and reconstructs the past (times and selves) through memory which poses its own problems. Memory is notorious for hiatus caused by natural forgetting or selective exclusion and inclusion of certain events and facts about the past. In a family or nation, certain authorial figures may censor narratives as true or false, sayable or unsayable, premising this censorship on the priorities of their own self projects. Thus truth depends on the censorship, which is largely arbitrary, especially when it is recognized that it is intended to prop up particular political projects. Noting the problems that mark memory and the biased politics of self imaging in narratives, this study seeks to circumvent the reconstruction of the past, the interpretation of events and staging of identities in a monolithic mode. This untethering of identities, multiple meanings of events and versions of truth, I argue, can be done through autobiographies being read as auto- heterobiography. Auto-heterobiographical readings of narratives allow multifaceted versions of truth and being. The heterogeneity that marks auto-heterobiography, by permitting the simultaneity of absence and presence precludes the exclusionary moves of biased political, historiographical and self-privileging narratives. Justification of the study 2 Autobiography, notoriously lacking canonicity for long, has been peripherised in modes of inquiry into the human condition (Schwan 2014). This has been a consequence of studies that have privileged explorations of groups such as nations or communities as seen in anthropology and sociology. This study seeks to prove that autobiography, especially re-interpreted as auto- heterobiography, has ramifications in the understanding of the complicated ethical relations implicated in the necessary recognition of alterity; that is Otherness as other version of personhood, being, narrative, identity, race and possibility. Auto-heterobiography, I argue, shows that even in established canons of study such as sociology, anthropology etc., it is the version of the self that narrates realities and identities. The study of auto-heterobiography therefore opens space for discussing how certain versions of truth, history, nation, family and personhood are privileged over others. This study seeks to present being, identity and all reality as simultaneity so as to transcend the univocality of biased selves, national historiographies and family
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