Stories of Women

Why is the nation in a post colonial world so often seen as a motherland? This path breaking study, "Stories of women: Gender and Narrative in the Post colonial Nation", explores the perennially fascinating relationship between gender icons and foundational fictions of the nation in different post colonial spaces. The leading critic and theorist of post colonial writing Elleke Boehmer's work on the crucial intersections between independence, nationalism and gender has already proved canonical in the field. "Stories of Women" combines her keynote essays on the mother figure and the post colonial nation, along with incisive new work on male autobiography, 'daughter' writers, the colonial body, the trauma of the post colony, and the nation in a transnational context. Focusing on Africa as well as South Asia, and sexuality as well as gender, Boehmer offers fine close readings of writers ranging from Achebe, Okri and Mandela to Arundhati Roy and Yvonne Vera, shaping these into a critical engagement with theorists of the nation like Fredric Jameson and Partha Chatterjee. Moving beyond cynical deconstructions of the post colony, the book mounts a bracing reassessment of the post colonial nation as a site of potential empowerment, as a 'paradoxical refuge' in a globalised world. "Stories of women" acts on its own impassioned argument that post colonial and nation-state studies address substantively issues hitherto raised chiefly within international feminism. It is likely to prove a landmark study in the field. The book will draw interest from readers and researchers of post colonial, international and women's writing; of nation theory, colonial history and historiography; and of Indian, African, migrant and diasporic literatures.