Postcolonial readings of resistance and negotiation in selected contemporary African writing

This dissertation is concerned with literary and postcolonial (re)configurations of resistance and negotiation as concepts through which to approach representations of postcolonial conflict in contemporary African literatures. These concepts operate at various levels of the narratives and open new routes for remembering, narrating, and reading violence through their problematization of discourses on African civil wars and political violence, on the one hand, and conceptions of national history, memory, and representation, on the other. While this study reconfigures negotiation and resistance beyond some of their earlier postcolonial definitions, it focuses on developing the notion of negotiation itself as a coping, reading, and discursive strategy which, nevertheless, does not aim for a resolution. Rather than a weakening of resistance, negotiation implies a pluralistic conception of social, political, and cultural agency. This dissertation posits negotiation as a concept of writing and reading which actively engages events, discourses, and remembering practices through their multiple facets and blurred or unstable boundaries. More specifically, this study explores the ways in which novelists Nuruddin Farah, Chenjerai Hove, Yvonne Vera, Chimamanda Adichie, and Sefi Atta deploy negotiation and resistance as tools for aesthetic and socio-political engagement in postcolonial narratives of conflict in Somalia, Zimbabwe, and Nigeria. Further, negotiation marks my reading of the texts and their intervention in national and global approaches to historiography and representation. While the novels foreground complex genealogies of postcolonial conflict, they also negotiate problematic issues of interrelated responsibilities and representations, including their own. In this sense, negotiation represents a conscious act through which we recognize the instability of any iii political, moral, or ethical battle while not allowing that realization to develop into paralyzing cynicism. Through its negotiated and interdisciplinary approach to narratives of violence, this dissertation does not only engage with multiple discourses deriving from postcolonial, African, and literary studies. It also intervenes into conceptions of the nation, national violence, memory, accountability, and justice from philosophical, political, and cultural fields of study. In addition to critical perspectives on contemporary African literatures, the chapters interrogate the works of a diverse range of theorists such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o, David Jefferess, Pheng Cheah, and Wole Soyinka. This eclectic approach asserts and reflects the novels’ attention to the irreducible complexity of local and global factors as well as individual and collective responsibilities in the production of narratives of national history and belonging. A negotiated engagement with discourses surrounding questions of postcolonialty in the era of globalization discourses helps reconceptualize the postcolonial perspective to resist dehistoricized and decontextualized accounts of political and social conflict in African contexts. Chapter 1 elaborates the key concepts and theoretical contexts which shape the dissertation as a whole. While chapter 2 explores resistance and negotiation in figurative language through metonymy in the representations of the Somali civil war, chapter 3 engages with the trope of spectrality in the complex narration of history and national violence in Zimbabwe. Finally, chapter 4 negotiates concepts of representation and responsibility in narratives of postcolonial trauma in Nigeria. iv Keywords : negotiation, resistance, African literature, violence, responsibility, nation, representation.

Keyphrases: Violence, Nation, Negotiation, Resistance, African literature, Violence, Responsibility, Nation, Representation