Border thinking as literary imaginations : rereading decolonial entanglements in fiction by Bessie Head, Tsitsi Dangarembga and Kopano Matlwa

Abstract

The thesis Border thinking as literary imaginations: Rereading decolonial entanglements in fiction by Bessie Head, Tsitsi Dangarembga and Kopano Matlwa is inspired by the contemporary decolonial debates and draws both from decolonial thinkers and feminist border theories. Within the conceptual corpus of decolonial thinking, this study employs María Lugones’s concept of the coloniality of gender to examine the representation of border feminism in the trilogies of Bessie Head, Tsitsi Dangarembga and Kopano Matlwa. I regard these writers as three sisters in struggle since, although their struggles are different, they write to raise awareness of ‘women’/human issues, they call for solidarity, and they are writing back. The selected semi-autobiographical trilogies are significant since they, despite their generational differences, are connected through bloodlines of women’s resistance against the coloniality of gender and the marginality of African experiences in general. In this study, the domination and exploitation of ‘women’ are understood as part of the coloniality of gender that has resulted in the systemic and structural exclusion of ‘women’ from mainstream economic and political life in the Global South of which southern Africa is a part. In this way, the study re-situates and re-thinks the reading of the selected body of primary texts as well as relevant theoretical material. Herein lies the originality of this thesis, and it is here that I mobilise border thinking as a method that shows how it is to think, know, write and do differently. By drawing from the decolonial ecologies of knowledges and feminist border theories to understand the selected body of southern African women’s writing, the study contributes to the critical discussions on the modern concept of gender, and modernity/coloniality in general, and the relevance of decolonial thinking in the fictive imagination and performance of writers of the Global South. The concepts of the coloniality of gender and border thinking, combined, clarify how ‘women’ of the Global South largely experience domination, oppression, and exploitation first as black people and next as ‘women’ that are located, geographically and biographically, in the sphere of colonial difference. In its own way, therefore, the present study contributes to the expansion of literature and scholarship in the fields of decoloniality, feminism and liberation in the Global South. Decolonial feminism is awake to the intersections of race, class, biography and geography in the oppression of ‘women’.