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Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/11375/18200
Title: Cross-Epistemological Feminist Conversations Between Indigenous Canada and South Africa
Authors: Forsyth, Jessie Wanyeki
Advisor: Strauss, Helene
Department: English and Cultural Studies
Keywords: Indigenous literatures;Postcolonial literatures;women's literatures;South Africa;gender;racialization;indigeneity;colonialism;apartheid;resistance;Canada;conversation;epistemology;relationality;social change;feminism;political change;transformation;knowledge production
Publication Date: Nov-2015
Abstract: This is a project that takes inequality as its starting point to ask not why it persists in all its myriad forms, but rather how we might better understand its resiliency in order to re-orient our responses. It asks how we can re-imagine one another and work across asymmetrical divides in ways that move us towards substantial forms of social justice, actively disallowing the entrenchment of hierarchical valuing systems, and how we can engage with literature as part of reconfiguring ‘equality’ in the process. These questions are traced through Indigenous women’s literatures in Canada and black South African women’s literatures as sites of deeply textured resistance and re-imagined relationality. My analysis focuses on select texts from the 1980s to present in two primary archives: from Indigenous Canada, The Book of Jessica: A Theatrical Transformation (Maria Campbell in collaboration with Linda Griffiths) and Monkey Beach (Eden Robinson); and from South Africa, Mother to Mother (Sindiwe Magona) and Coconut (Kopano Matlwa). I use conversation as my methodological and thematic compass for seeking modes of enabling comprehension across perniciously unequal systems of making meaning and considering the possibilities for transformative knowledge production and textual interpretation at sites of unequal intersubjective exchange. I employ an uneasy comparative practice that I base on horizontal forms of juxtaposition within conversational structures, and I argue that conversation’s generative instability and risky uncertainty open onto hopeful possibilities for transformative change.
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/11375/18200
Appears in Collections:Open Access Dissertations and Theses

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Forsyth Jessie W Final Submission 2015 09 PhD.pdf
Open Access
PhD Dissertation Jessie Forsyth1.48 MBAdobe PDFView/Open
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