Expressive states: the gendered nation as literary text and narrative

My thesis examines gender through historical fiction and autobiographies set within 20th - century post-colonial national histories. My work demonstrates the value of literary genre and form in reading ‘for history’, and the relevance of thinking political questions of nation and gender through an engagement with a ‘postcolonial poetics’. This allows me to highlight the complex interface between medium and message which readings of nation-gender in purely sociological terms tend to overlook. In keeping with this methodological slant, the thesis analyses the expressive economies of nine texts which narrate critical moments and transitions in the lives of new nation-states and the upheavals of gender organisation accompanying such moments of scrutiny and revaluation of models of national identity and citizenship. In line with my comparativist approach, my selection of primary texts covers a globally-diverse range of national and cultural locations. Naguib Mahfouz and Carlos Fuentes (in translation), Salman Rushdie, Nayantara Sahgal, Suniti Namjoshi, and Nuruddin Farah comprise the writers who I read for their scripting of post-colonial national histories – public and personal - from their respective locations. The comparative and ‘transnational’ nature of my undertaking is not only achieved in reading through a common mode (an attention to aesthetic categories) the inscription and reimagining of the nation-gender nexus across the selected range of texts, but also overlaps with tracing the after-lives of Western/ metropolitan aesthetics in their new host postcolonial texts. The latter concern allows me to highlight issues around the cultural transfer of aesthetic and form in the way they impact a reading on gender, especially in the final three chapters of the thesis. The theoretical positioning of the project thus brings into dialogue theory on the nation, gender concerns within national frameworks, an attention to literary generic and formal resources, and finally systems of global interconnection, circulation and travel, namely concepts of Transnationalism and World Literature.