Rites of Passage in Postcolonial Women's Writing

About this book

This volume brings a variety of new approaches and contexts to modern and contemporary women's writing. Contributors include both new and well-established scholars from Europe, Australia, the USA, and the Caribbean. Their essays draw on, adapt, and challenge anthropological perspectives on rites of passage derived from the work of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner. Collectively, the essays suggest that women's writing and women's experiences from diverse cultures go beyond any straightforward notion of a threefold structure of separation, transition, and incorporation. Some essays include discussion of traditional rites of passage such as birth, motherhood, marriage, death, and bereavement; others are interested in exploring less traditional, more fluid, and/or problematic rites such as abortion, living with HIV/AIDS, and coming into political consciousness. Contributors seek ways of linking writing on rites of passage to feminist, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic theories which foreground margins, borders, and the outsider. The three opening essays explore the work of the Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera, whose groundbreaking work explored taboo subjects such as infanticide and in…