Métissage, memory and resistance in postcolonial narratives
Abstract
My study explores the role of métissage in shaping alternative versions of history, identity and memory in Coquelicot du massacre by Evelyne Accad, Sitt Marie Rose by Etel Adrian, Beloved by Toni Morrison, and Corregidora by Gayl Jones. Using interdisciplinary and feminist approaches, it probes the insights of these postcolonial women writers and examines their contribution to our understanding of cultural, linguistic, historical, and spatial métissage. The dissertation also argues that such a process fashions heterogeneous yet comparable spaces of resistance involving religious and gendered configurations in the Lebanese novels discussed and historical, racial and gendered constructs in the African American works analyzed. These ambivalent and fragmented spaces play a significant role in bringing together different styles, traditions, and perceptions, in a move that challenges polarizations serving as the basis for the construction of Western hierarchies. Working within such border zones, the postcolonial women writers discussed in my study negotiate tensions and encounters between the indigenous and the colonial, the local and the global, tradition and modernity, and self and other. Through métissage, they articulate frameworks for the reconfiguration of controversial issues related to naming, transmission, storytelling, orality, literacy, war, identity, exile, education, colonialism, postcolonialism, nationalism, and feminism.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Sharpley-Whiting, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Comparative literature|American literature|Middle Eastern literature|African Americans|Womens studies
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