“Towards the Retrieval of the Lost Voice: Contestation and Reclamation of Discourse in Half a Century of African Women’s Europhone Fiction”

Abstract

Propelled by politics, sub-Saharan African women’s fiction witnessed a phenomenal growth in the twentieth century. On the basis of African women’s primary role in early child education and the transmission of oral literature, their creative writing, coming after their exclusion from the public sphere, represents attempts at the re-appropriation of lost literary space and discursive power. This essay seeks to study the contestatory elements constitutive of the literary production by African women writers from the late 1940s to the end of the twentieth century. The essay establishes that two phases emerge from this creativity. First, between 1947 and 1974, female African women’s writing is marked by the politicization of the domestic. In the second cycle spanning the period between 1975 and 2000, feminist African creative writing is characterized by the deepening and radicalization of the already politicized private realm.