Hostname: page-component-5c6d5d7d68-wtssw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-08-16T14:21:27.602Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Raising Women’s Consciousness Towards Transformation in Nigeria: The Role of Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 August 2021

Grace E. Okereke
Get access

Extract

This paper illuminates the marginalization or absenting of the female from transformational processes in Nigeria evident in male-authored works, specifically the novel. This has engendered the woman writer’s creative response to the need for consciousness raising towards female capabilities, by redefining the female as an achiever in multiple transformational spaces—cultural, social, economic, educational, political. The paper argues that literature has played and is still playing a major role in female consciousness raising towards the transformation of Nigerian society.

Consciousness denotes awareness. Thus, to be conscious is to attain a state of awareness. Given that “the locus of consciousness [is] the psyche,” consciousness raising should re-educate and re-structure the psyche towards a growing awareness. Transformation connotes change in all spheres of life—the cultural, social, economic, educational, political, etc.

Type
Research Article
Information
African Issues , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , 1997 , pp. 28 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1997 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Dr. Grace Okereke teaches English and Literary Studies at the University of Calabar in Calabar, Cross River State, Nigeria

References

Notes

1. Clark, Katerina and Holquist, Michael, Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984, 228 Google Scholar.

2. Okereke, Grace E., “Education as a Colonial Heritage and the Nigerian Woman in Literature,” Conference Proceedings on Women in Africa and the African Diaspora—Bridges Across Activism and the Academy, vol. V, 1996, p. 162 Google Scholar.

3. Ogunyemi, Chikwenya O., “Women and Nigerian Literature,” in Ogunbiyi, Yemi, ed., Perspectives on Nigerian Literature: 1700 to the Present, Vol. One. Lagos, Nigeria: Guardian Books, 1988, 60–67 Google Scholar.

4. James, Adeola, ed., In Their Own Voices: African Women Writers Talk, London: James Currey, 1990, 153 Google Scholar.

5. MacKinnon, Catharine A., “Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: An Agenda for Theory,” Signs, 7.3, 1982, 515-44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. Leslie, Molara Ogundipe-, “The Female Writer and Her Commitment,” in Women in African Literature Today-ALT 15, Jones, E.D., Palmer, E. & Jones, M., editors. London: James Currey, 1987, 5–13 Google Scholar.

7. Oku, Julia Inyang E. , “Courtesans and Earthmothers: A Feminist Reading of Ekwensi’s Jagua Nona’s Daughter and Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood ,” in Emenyonu, Ernest N., ed., Critical Theory and African Literature, Ibadan: Heinemann, 1987, 225-33Google Scholar.

8. Preez, Peter du , The Politics of Identity: Ideology and the Human Image, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980 Google Scholar.