Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Gender, and the Ethics of Postcolonial Reading
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A01=Brendon Nicholls
African literary criticism
Aid Virus
Author_Brendon Nicholls
Black Bird
Black Hermit
Category=DS
Category=DSA
Category=DSBH
Category=NHH
Circumcision Debate
Colonial Administration
crow
Dark Secret Love
dedan
Dedan Kimathi
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
ethical cultural analysis
facing
Facing Mount Kenya
female agency in literature
feminist postcolonial theory
gendered narratives in African fiction
gikuyu
Gikuyu cultural studies
Gikuyu Culture
Gikuyu Women
Independent Schools
kenya
kenyan
Kenyan History
Kenyan National Identity
kimathi
Maina Wa Kinyatti
Mau Mau rebellion history
Micere Githae Mugo
mount
Mrs Hill
Mystic Masseur
Ngugi Wa
Ngugi Wa Mirii
Ngugi's Novels
Ngugi's Representations
Ngugi’s Novels
Ngugi’s Representations
Uterine Social Organization
Wa Nja
Waruhiu Itote
wizard
women
Young Man
Product details
- ISBN 9781138376120
- Weight: 410g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 19 Dec 2018
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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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 symptomatic of the cultural conditions that they address. Reading Ngugi's fiction in terms of its Gikuyu allusions and references, a gendered narrative of history emerges that creates transgressive spaces for women. Nicholls bases his discussion on moments during the Mau Mau rebellion when women's contributions to the anticolonial struggle could not be reduced to a patriarchal narrative of Kenyan history, and this interpretive maneuver permits a reading of Ngugi's fiction that accommodates female political and sexual agency. Nicholls contributes to postcolonial theory by proposing a methodology for reading cultural difference. This methodology critiques cultural practices like clitoridectomy in an ethical manner that seeks to avoid both cultural imperialism and cultural relativisim. His strategy of 'performative reading,' that is, making the conditions of one text (such as folklore, history, or translation) active in another (for example, fiction, literary narrative, or nationalism), makes possible an ethical reading of gender and of the conditions of reading in translation.
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.
