Abstract
M.A. (English)
This study uses the concepts of space, voice, gender, and power to examine, question and,
ultimately, challenge fixed notions of feminine identity in postcolonial social and cultural spaces.
To this end, the dissertation undertakes a study of Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing, Tsitsi
Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. It contends
that the three novels present the (post)colonial female subject as always gendered and her
resistance always curtailed. Henri Lefebvre’s theory of space as ideologically produced, in The
Production of Space (1991), is used to investigate the production of gendered spaces in the three
novels and of space as relational, that is, as connected to identity. Against this background, I argue
that Ammu, in The God of Small Things, figures as the insider-outsider in the spaces that she
inhabits, precisely because they are underwritten by the ideology of caste and kinship that seeks
to preserve certain orders of purity and impurity, including gender and sexual purity, in the service
of social and gender hierarchy. Similarly, Mary, in The Grass is Singing, finds herself co-opted
into a racial “espirit de corps” (2007: 3) as a white woman but. as a woman she is an outsider in
the farm space presided over by white men. Lastly, Tambudzai, in Nervous Conditions, finds her
voice as her primary space, her home, slowly opens out to the contending spaces of her cousin
Nyasha’s home and the convent, where, “fitfully, something in [her] mind beg[ins] to assert itself”
(2004: 204). At botton, this study concerns itself with forms of containment and resistance, and
with gender and sexuality as connecting tissues in the three novels’ conceptions of speech and
silence.
I extend my discussion through a consideration of Michel Foucault’s analysis of the economy of
power, of how power is distributed in (social) spaces, and its connection to and influence on human
agency. Foucault’s study is used to survey Ammu’s character as at once powerful by virtue of class
and caste privilege and powerless on account of her gender; Mary Turner as both a vehicle for and
a target of white male power; and Tambudzai’s character as caught between competing senses of
culture and resistance. This study ultimately discusses how the identity of the (post)colonial female
subject is embedded in the social, cultural and historical spaces that she inhabits.