Peripheral visions: Postcolonial images of Africa in the fiction of Margaret Laurence, Audrey Thomas, and Dave Godfrey.
Date
1994
Authors
Vincent, Kerry Jamieson.
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Dalhousie University
Abstract
Description
Africanist discourse has so distorted Africa that its reality is perceived only to the extent that it conforms to what has been previously written about the continent. This discourse has largely been constructed by countries with colonialist or imperialist interests, but the global impact of its cumulative influence becomes apparent when writers from Canada--itself a former colony--choose to represent Africa in their fiction.
The struggle which Margaret Laurence, Audrey Thomas, and Dave Godfrey undergo to resist and revise past representations of Africa places them in the larger context of postcolonial writing, even as their fiction carries traces of these same insistently pervasive representations. The meeting with the Other dramatized by these writers in many variations--friendship, fear, antagonism, rejection, reconciliation--signals an effort to close the gulf and dissolve oppositions such as subject/object, self/other, colonizer/colonized, and even male/female. In turn, such binomial relations parallel and inform the inherent power of language as a subjugating force. While their impulse to universalize experience is dependent on an ontology based primarily in the West, the narrative strategies these writers employ reflect attempts to decentre and disrupt the readers' complacency and force a break from preconceived notions of Africa. In their efforts to recover the image of Africa, the authors themselves often willfully confine themselves to the margins of the text, and consign the readers' conventional vision of Africa to the periphery.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dalhousie University (Canada), 1994.
The struggle which Margaret Laurence, Audrey Thomas, and Dave Godfrey undergo to resist and revise past representations of Africa places them in the larger context of postcolonial writing, even as their fiction carries traces of these same insistently pervasive representations. The meeting with the Other dramatized by these writers in many variations--friendship, fear, antagonism, rejection, reconciliation--signals an effort to close the gulf and dissolve oppositions such as subject/object, self/other, colonizer/colonized, and even male/female. In turn, such binomial relations parallel and inform the inherent power of language as a subjugating force. While their impulse to universalize experience is dependent on an ontology based primarily in the West, the narrative strategies these writers employ reflect attempts to decentre and disrupt the readers' complacency and force a break from preconceived notions of Africa. In their efforts to recover the image of Africa, the authors themselves often willfully confine themselves to the margins of the text, and consign the readers' conventional vision of Africa to the periphery.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dalhousie University (Canada), 1994.
Keywords
Literature, Canadian (English).