Feminism, Rebellious Women, and Cultural Boundaries: Rereading Flora Nwapa and Her Compatriots

Abstract

a very important essay titled The Nature of Things: Arrested Decolonization and Critical Theory, Biodun Jeyifo effectively highlights and responds to some of the pertinent issues in the debates among critics of African literature in the past few decades concerning the interpretation of African literature. I totally agree with Jeyifo that discourse as epistemic behavior is sustained by the unequal power relations between the two camps (Foreign Africanists and Local Nationalists) where 'Africanists' have come to hold sway over the discipline in an especially problematic manner, and their narrowly formulated agenda increasingly dominates perceptions of 'what is to be done' at the present in the field. This agenda consists primarily of winning and legitimacy for the discipline of African literary study in the developed countries (44; emphasis in the original). While recognizing the wonderful contributions of Africanists to the study of African literature, we must not leave unscrutinized the packaging of African literature that has won or will win this respectability and legitimacy. If African literature has to win anything, it has to win it on its own terms. Furthermore, the ideological preferences of Jeyifo's essay need reexamination and further elaboration: In the deafening silence of the connection between demands for critical fidelity or rigorous analytical technics and the positions of entrenched power or privilege (or lack of them) from which any scholar or critic evaluates or theorizes,

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