Writing 'home': mediating between 'the local' and 'the literary' in a selection of postcolonial women's texts

This paper will focus on a selection of texts by postcolonial women writers, including Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, Adhaf Soueif and Assia Djebar to explore the ways that the worlds of ‘the oral’ and ‘the scribal’ intersect and/or collide in their fictions. Many Caribbean writers and/or critics have argued for orality as the privileged signifier of the local and the paper will begin by exploring the ways that this is both endorsed and challenged in the fiction of Rhys and Kincaid. The argument will then be extended in a discussion of writers from other postcolonial locations, focusing on the way that the figure of ‘the servant’ is often mobilised to mediate between ‘the local’ and ‘the literary’. The paper will argue that the very diverse ways in which these writers negotiate the cultural spheres of ‘the local’ and ‘the literary’ offers useful insights into the possibilities and limitations of ‘regional’ and ‘postcolonial’ categorisations.