The Politics of Gender in Nigerian and Zimbabwean Women’s Fiction

The book presents the first comparative study of four prominent African women writers: Buchi Emecheta and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie from Nigeria, and Tsitsi Dangarembga and Yvonne Vera from Zimbabwe. The study explores issues of gender and resistance, while historicising and emphasising the literary legacies and genealogies of Anglophone African women’s writing from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The twelve novels analysed (1972–2018)—set in Nigeria, Zimbabwe, the United Kingdom, and the United States—depict women enduring multiple, intersecting forms of oppression, yet exercising agency and often employing extreme strategies to resist these restrictions. The theoretical framework draws on Black feminist, postcolonial, and African diasporic perspectives. Through a comparative and ethnographic approach, the author maps a pan-African route that connects different countries and historical periods, highlighting shared experiences of women and girls across the continent and beyond.

This book was the Joint Winner of the 2022 Peter Lang Emerging Scholars Competition in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies in the field of Literature and Culture.