1st Edition
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Gender, and the Ethics of Postcolonial Reading
By Brendon Nicholls
Copyright 2010
222 Pages
by
Routledge
222 Pages
by
Routledge
222 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
This is the first comprehensive book-length study of gender politics in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's fiction. Brendon Nicholls argues that mechanisms of gender subordination are strategically crucial to Ngugi's ideological project from his first novel to his most recent one. Nicholls describes the historical pressures that lead Ngugi to represent women as he does, and shows that the novels themselves are... Read more
Contents: Introduction; A topography of 'woman'; Clitoridectomy and Gikuyu nationalism; The landscape of insurgency; Reading against the grain (of wheat); Paternity, illegitimacy and intertextuality; The neocolony as a prostituted economy; Conclusion - prostituting translation: an ethics of postcolonial reading; Bibliography; Index.
Biography
Brendon Nicholls is a Lecturer in African and Postcolonial Literatures in the School of English, University of Leeds. He was Deputy Co-Director of the Institute for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies.
'Brendon Nicholls revisits old issues such as gender and nationalism in African literature with freshness and deploys historical context in his reading of Ngugi's texts with amazing discrimination. His book compels us to look at the politics of translation in African literature with new insights and to see translation as a source of creative energy and agency, rather than the space within which "original" meaning or the autochthon is violated'. James Ogude, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa and author of Ngugi’s Novels and African History ’... the book provides readers with a clear grasp of the subject matter... Recommended.’ Choice 'A well-researched and highly theoretical monograph...' Review of English Studies '... very informed and illuminating analysis.' Wasafiri
