FACULTY OF ARTS
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Item Morphing restrictive gender roles into performative gender roles in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s hibiscus pourpre(Department of Religious Studies, University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria., 2021-06) Olayinka, E. B.Through feminist literature and other forms of feminist endeavours to institutionalise gender equality, the notion of biology is destiny as identified by the social and natural sciences has come under the attack of feminists. Debunking the stereotyping of women and assignation and restriction of specific gender roles to specific sex whereby certain roles are christened as women’s roles and certain others as men’s roles is part of this feminist project. In Hibiscus Poupre, Chimamanda Adichie weaves in the flexibility of roles to engage with the theme of gender roles and performativity. From what she demonstrates, the fixity of gender roles through decades of cultural construction can be deconstructed and reconstructed to foster harmony among the genders. Womanism as a theory that focuses on complementarity of gender roles is used to interrogate and x-ray the subtle ways in which the author downplays gender role stereotyping and brings to the fore the pivotal roles of African Women using Igbo ethos construct as model. Under the pretext of being a practising Catholic, Eugene, Tatie Ifeoma’s biological brother, neglects the care of his aged father whom he accuses of idolatry. He thus jettisons the traditional roles expected of a male child in Igbo society. The female, Tatie Ifeoma is seen laden with the responsibilities that the male child fails to carry out traditionally. Within her household, chores are shared between male and female children without pigeonholing of roles. Every member of the family diligently carries out their responsibilities without reference to whether a particular chore is meant for female or male. This is seen to be one of the core factors for harmony in Tatie Ifeoma’s household where the latter, a widow and poorly paid faculty at the University of Nsukka, plays the family head. In conclusion, emphasises that gender performativity is not typecast. The author demonstrates how Western religion is used to obliterate and suppress traditional African religions and their practitioners. Gender role iteration is also allowed in reversed order to deconstruct conventional tradition of allocating roles based on gender.Item THE DISCOURSE OF GENERATIONAL DIFFERENCE IN SELECTED NOVELS OF MAYA ANGELOU AND TERRY MCMILLAN(2014-01) UDOETTE, MONICA SYLVANUSAfrican American literature has been predominantly a male-preserve in the task of narrating the experience of slavery and its relics of denigration before the advent of reactionary literature by black female writers. Studies on female-authored African American literary works have concentrated on responding to male-authored representations of the tensions of racism, internal crisis of man-woman relationships and the challenges of empowering the black female character. Little attention has been paid to African American female writings across generations and gender categories. This study, therefore, investigates the narrative thrusts of selected works of Maya Angelou and Terry McMillan to determine the dimensions of divergence across generations of African American female writers. The study adopts Alice Walker‘s womanist theory and bell hooks‘ feminist theory which account for differences in the construction of black women consciousness. Six novels – Maya Angelou‘s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), Gather Together in my Name (1974), and The Heart of a Woman (1981), and Terry McMillan‘s Waiting to Exhale (1992), A Day Late and a Dollar Short (2001) and The Interruption of Everything (2005) – were purposively selected. The texts are subjected to literary and comparative analyses. From the first autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings to the last The Heart of a Woman, Angelou offers detailed testimony on the effects of displacement on the individual psyche and the black community. Maya Angelou‘s selected novels reveal the creation of a collective communal memory through the use of the autobiographical prose form. Angelou‘s narratives reveal her understanding of history, her reverence for memory of collective black folk tradition and represent the Black Arts era. In contrast, Terry McMillan‘s Waiting to Exhale, A Day Late and a Dollar Short and The Interruption of Everything reveal a paradigm shift from the communal experience to the individual, the internal crisis among individuals in the family and aspiration of specific sentiments as she projects the female character as ambitious and daring. McMillan‘s fiction stands out in several ways. She revises and borrows recognisable literary conventions to project the changing roles of women to reinforce her radical perspective. However, the choice of professionally successful black women as characters in her novels relates to the drastic increase in the population of working class women in the 1990s and reflexive of the post-womanist tradition. Her works accentuate the quest for personal liberty, romance and intimate relationships as the central conflicts facing black female protagonists. Although two decades separate Angelou‘s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Terry McMillan‘s Waiting to Exhale, a close reading of the novels reveals that the texts derive qualitative interpretations from the unique difference in ideas and aesthetics represented by Alice Walker, bell hooks and other Black feminists. While Maya Angelou‘s novels keep within the womanist tradition, those by Terry McMillan are radically feminist and modernist in orientation. Thus, the two writers exemplify the Black Arts era and post-womanist literary generation respectively and differently situate the novels within specific historical, socio-political, economic, gendered and literary contexts. Key words: Generational difference, Womanism, African American literature, Maya Angelou, Terry McMillan. Word count: 498