Reading the Figure of Woman in African Literature: Psychoanalysis, Difference, and Desire

This article examines two interconnected discourses of racial identity in colonial and postcolonial writing to challenge the narratives of difference as they now exist in postcolonial theory. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon translates psychoanalysis from a discourse of sexual difference into a discourse of racial difference while explaining the colonial condition. Homi Bhabha subsequently adopts this specific Fanon to create his own psychoanalytic narrative, centered around desire. Rewriting sexual into racial difference, however, introduces a ghost into postcolonial theory: the figure of woman. Marking the site at which translation becomes visible and haunting, she reveals both what is at stake in the act of translation and what is being occluded—the disposition of desire. Rereading Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, the essay argues that attending to the figure of woman enables revised understandings of African literature and postcolonial subjectivity.