| dc.description.abstract | Studies on the relationship between gender and the nation tend to underscore the experiences of women, while obfuscating more complex understandings of gender, and eschewing a critical engagement with the ways in which men, too, are affected by constructions of the nation. Not only are the effects of the nation on men critically overlooked and undertheorized, but scholarship that addresses men as gendered beings in the nation is also quite scarce. In this dissertation, I examine what African literature can tell us about what constructions of masculinity mean to the nation and what the nation means to concepts of masculinity. More, specifically, I am interested in how this fluid and in-flux, yet symbiotic, relationship is depicted in African literature and what African literature can tell us about the relationships among African masculinities, African nations, and the exercise of power in post-independence nations(-states). I employ an interdisciplinary method drawn from postcolonial and feminist theories and masculinities studies concepts that breaks down the gendered dichotomies often relied upon in African literary and feminist studies scholarship on gender. Prevalent binaries such as colonial versus traditional, feminine versus masculine, or powerful versus powerless have led critics to narrowly define male characters as “oppressors,” “agents of patriarchy,” or “extensions of colonialism,” limiting our ability to understand, as I argue in chapter one, the complex moves someone like Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Dangerembga makes as she imagines a powerful patriarch who is overwhelmed by the multiple and conflicting gender roles both colonialism and traditional culture prescribe to him, or, as I argue in chapter four, the moves someone like Nigerian writer Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani makes as she imagines a violent, corrupt, and reprehensible Big Man who is also “good” for the nation. As a corrective, my project offers ways to see African masculinities and nationalisms represented in African novels as inextricably relational and fluid, rather than oppositional and fixed. Through this methodology, I interrogate with more flexibility how African authors situate their concerns within the gendered relations of (neo)colonialism, anti-colonialism, and the construction of new nations; what they seem to be saying about different versions of masculinity and the nation; and how they challenge and reconfigure discourses on gender and nationalisms by offering counter-narratives that redefine not only what it may mean to be an “African” man but what it means to be a postcolonial African nation as well. | |
