Murder she wrote : reading Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor's Dust as Feminist postcolonial crime fiction

Abstract

In this thesis, I make a case for feminist methods of reading postcolonial crime fiction by using Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s novel, Dust, in order to investigate the gendered construction of criminality in Kenya. While Dust has correctly been read as an historical fiction text that challenges the hegemonic narratives which uphold the postcolonial state as is, much less attention has been paid to the ways in which its female characters have made this possible. Through the three featured women in the text, I argue that postcolonial feminist crime fiction proffers ways to interrogate and reimagine phallocratic vernaculars and structures of nationhood and citizenship, human rights and security, and the historical framework of what judicially constitutes a life, and what does not. By reading women’s silence and women’s memory as forensic tools against the state’s masculinist storytelling praxis, I attempt to contribute to the dismantling and reconstruction of the ‘human’ in art, human rights work, legal policy, and other social imaginaries.