In my mother’s house: African women poets and radical translation of négritude
Creators: name: Bamgbose, Gabriel Sunday
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2022

description: This dissertation rethinks négritude poetics from African women’s perspectives. Emerging from Black intellectual engagements in the interwar period in France as a response to global antiblack racism, négritude has come under fierce criticism for its supposed essentialism and reductive definition of Black and African culture and identity. Despite recent intellectual efforts to rethink négritude as a critique of colonial modernity, critics are yet to study African women’s articulations of the poetics. "In My Mother’s House" offers new interpretations of négritude by situating the discourse at the intersection of comparative poetics, feminist, postcolonial, and decolonial thoughts. This dissertation argues that African women writers reconceive the Black poetics to articulate feminist and decolonial visions of life. It examines twentieth- and twenty-first-century African women’s poetic texts in multiple languages (English, French, and Portuguese) and locations (Senegal, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Nigeria) by combining critical, historical, and cultural analysis with archival research. Its interdisciplinary and comparative approach to négritude explodes the colonial boundaries implicitly orienting the familiar paradigms of African/world literary studies by transgressing the linguistic and geographical divide between the fields of Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone Africa. In four chapters, this border-crossing work explores how selected African women poets unsettle the dominant androcentric and francocentric formation of négritude discourse by challenging the colonial and gender limits of its anticolonial imagination. The first chapter on gender and genre challenges the racialized masculinization of the poetic genre by illuminating how Phillis Wheatley’s poetry encodes a critique of the coloniality of poetic knowledge. A figure outside the historical period engaged in this project, Wheatley is a foundational transnational African female figure whose life and work allow us to think about the relation of poetry, patronage, authorship, and epistemic translation to race, class, and gender. Critical reflection on this relation raises the question of the social imaginary legitimizing Black masculinity in négritude discourse and the implications it has on African women’s knowledge production. The remaining chapters move through Anglophone, Lusophone, and Francophone geographies of négritude poetics, analyzing how African women poets recalibrate the concepts of the mother (Ifi Amadiume and Catherine Acholonu), the cry (Alda Espírito Santo and Maria Manuela Margarido), and rhythm (Annette Mbaye d’Erneville and Ndèye Coumba Mbengue Diakhaté) as they redefine the terms of négritude discourse. This transnational, transcultural, and multilingual inquiry into African feminist articulations of négritude concludes that women’s poetry interrogates the patriarchal problem of the discourse and redefines its liberation project through a radical critique of the multiple and intersectional violence on Black/African life.