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Western Experiences: Education and "Third World Women"in the Fictions of Tsitsi Dangarembga and Meena Alexander
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Western Experiences: Education and "Third World Women"in the Fictions of Tsitsi Dangarembga and Meena Alexander

R.K. Gairola
Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Vol.4(2)
2000
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Abstract

Perhaps one of the most ironic elements of postcolonial literary analysis is the fact that readers and critics alike must access and interact with the English language, the imperial tongue of many postcolonial nations, to write about its hegemonizing force on a global level. When combined with the codifying problems of culture and tradition in given pre-independence contexts, it is no wonder that a number of postcolonial feminists have questioned the relationship between the woman and the postcolonial, one subaltern subject with another. In her essay "A Feminist Approach to African Literature," Kristen Holt Petersen asks, "which is the more important, which comes first, the fight for female equality or the fight against Western cultural imperialism?" (252). This question is further problematized when education and language are mixed into the complexity of identities and their constructed hierarchies as channeled and/or policed by colonial discourse, which transforms into the norm and thus generates stereotypes, alliances and biases within the native community...

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