COMMITTED WOMEN'S WRITING AND THE REALIST FORM IN THE TIME OF POLITICAL DISILLUSIONMENT

Abstract

My research is concerned with how committed women novelists navigated the problem of decolonization at different points of its crises in the twentieth century and in its varying coordinates in the global south. As such, the chapters unpack my overarching claim that within their larger historical novels about political excesses, error, and failure, the authors experimented with minor and yet distinct narrative forms through which they problematized the tensions in committed political relations. Specifically, the autofictional component in Han Suyin’s And the Rain My Drink (1956), the confessional element in Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter (1979), and the teleological narrative in Ninotchka Rosca’s Twice Blessed (1992), inscribe and rethink the ideological miscarrying of collective resistance. Ultimately, I argue that what the narratives code as failed visions of social justice, carried out along counter-hegemonic, nationalist lines is, at the same time, a gendered and radical rethinking of political subjectivity as relational practice.