Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-swr86 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-21T07:47:24.508Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

What They Told Buchi Emecheta: Oral Subjectivity and the Joys of “Otherhood”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Cynthia Ward
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

While positive constructions of identity may be used in the service of historically oppressed groups, readings that isolate either “African” or “feminist” identity in the works of Nigerian novelist Buchi Emecheta highlight the problematics of both literary selfrepresentation and postmodern deconstruction of identity. An examination of Emecheta's autobiography Head above Water and her novel The Joys of Motherhood, however, suggests that Emecheta's works respond to a West African vernacular tradition of storytelling that resists the application of normative models of identity and instead demonstrates the importance of each individual to the community. This vernacular tradition, elaborated in Emecheta's work by a nonparadigmatic tension between “oral” and “literate subjectivity” (a tension potentially present to varying degrees in non-African subjectivity but “marked” in West Africa by multilingualism and the copresence of vernacular and literate languages), provides a critique of productivist, authoritarian discourse.

Type
Special Topic: African and African American Literature
Information
PMLA , Volume 105 , Issue 1: Special Millennium issue , January 1990 , pp. 83 - 97
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1990

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. New York: Fawcett, 1959.Google Scholar
Ahmad, Aijaz. “Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory.‘” Social Text 17 (1987): 3–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baker, Houston A. Jr. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baker, Houston A. Jr. “Caliban's Triple Play.” “Race,” Writing, and Difference. Ed. Gates, Henry Louis Jr. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. 381–95.Google Scholar
Baudrillard, Jean. The Mirror of Production. Trans. Poster. St, Mark. Louis: Telos, 1975.Google Scholar
Bazin, Nancy Topping. “Feminist Perspectives in African Fiction: Bessie Head and Buchi Emecheta.” Black Scholar 17.2 (1986): 34–40.10.1080/00064246.1986.11414397CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chernoff, John Miller. African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979.Google Scholar
Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Madubuike, Ihechukwu. Toward the Decolonization of African Literature. Washington: Howard UP, 1983.Google Scholar
Emecheta, Buchi. The Bride Price. New York: Braziller, 1976.Google Scholar
Emecheta, Buchi. Double Yoke. New York: Braziller, 1983.Google Scholar
Emecheta, Buchi. Head above Water. London: Fontana, 1986.Google Scholar
Emecheta, Buchi. The Joys of Motherhood. New York: Braziller, 1979.Google Scholar
Emecheta, Buchi. Second-Class Citizen. New York: Braziller, 1975.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” The Foucault Reader. Ed. Rabinow, Paul. New York: Pantheon, 1984. 101–20.Google Scholar
Franco, Jean. “The Crisis of the Liberal Imagination and the Utopia of Writing.” Ideologies and Literature 1.1 (1976–77): 5–24.Google Scholar
Frank, Katherine “The Death of the Slave Girl: African Womanhood in the Novels of Buchi Emecheta.” World Literature Written in English 21 (1982): 476–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goody, Jack, and Watt, Ian. “The Consequences of Literacy.” Literacy in Traditional Societies. Ed. Goody, Jack. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1968. 27–68.Google Scholar
Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980's.” Socialist Review 80 (1985): 65–107.Google Scholar
Haraway, Donna. “Reading Buchi Emecheta: Contests for Women's Experience in Women's Studies.” Inscriptions 3–4 (1988): 107–24.Google Scholar
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm. The Philosophy of History. Trans. Sibree, J. New York: Dover, 1956.Google Scholar
Illich, Ivan. Gender. New York: Pantheon, 1982.Google Scholar
Jameson, Fredric “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Social Text 15 (1986): 65–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Bennington, Geoff and Massumi, Brian. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.Google Scholar
Miller, Christopher L. “Theories of Africans: The Question of Literary Anthropology.” “Race,” Writing and Difference. Ed. Gates, Henry Louis Jr. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. 281–300.Google Scholar
Morrison, Toni. Sula. New York: NAL, 1973.Google Scholar
Ogunyemi, Chikwenye Okonjo. “Buchi Emecheta: The Shaping of a Self.” Komparatistische Hefte 8 (1983): 65–78.Google Scholar
Ogunyemi, Chikwenye Okonjo. “Womanism: The Dynamics of the Contemporary Black Female Novel in English.” Signs 11 (1985): 63–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Solberg, Rolf. “The Woman of Black Africa, Buchi Emecheta: The Woman's Voice in the New Nigerian Novel.” English Studies 64 (1983): 247–62.Google Scholar
Umeh, Marie. “African Women in Transition in the Novels of Buchi Emecheta.” Présence africaine 116 (1980): 190–201.Google Scholar
Umeh, Marie. “The Joys of Motherhood: Myth or Reality?” Colby Library Quarterly 18 (1982): 39–46.Google Scholar