Browsing by Author "Okolie, Mary JanePatrick Nwakaego"

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Historicising borders : studies in Nigerian novels
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2019-12) Okolie, Mary JanePatrick Nwakaego; Jones, Megan; Roux, Daniel; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: More than ever before, border studies is enjoying scholarly attention and cutting across many disciplinary boundaries. The re-shaping of borders, triggered by globalisation and other trans-border historical events, has brought about the reassessment of the notion of borders as more than physical demarcations. Nonetheless, there has been little contribution from studies of African scholarship, and almost none from Nigeria, to the growing concern with and re-imagining of the border. My thesis provides an alternative imagining of the border by examining fictional representations of bordered identities foregrounded in the three generations of Nigerian literature. From the perspective of border poetics, which is the intervention of arts and culture in border studies, my research examines a range of fictional novels that thematise historical concerns related to geographical, cultural, ethnic, and social divides. The primary texts for this research are: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) and Chukwuemeka Ike’s Sunset at Dawn (1976), Festus Iyayi’s Violence (1979) and Okey Ndibe’s Arrows of Rain (2000), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013), Chika Unigwe’s Night Dancer (2012), and Elnathan John’s Born on a Tuesday (2016). This study engages three dimensions of borders and bordering in the novels selected: first, borders as social constructs drawn between opposing ideologies; second, borders as fluid and complex forms of intervention in social life; and third, borders as sites of frictional exchange and transformative interaction between the individuals and territories that are divided by these social constructs. The thesis is particularly preoccupied with literary characters' ability to negotiate their identity in the encounter with socially and culturally created divides and the spatial shifts that attend these forms of division. By engaging novels that speak to the national concerns prevalent in different periods of Nigerian literary history, my research demonstrates how literary texts conceptualise and engage the lived experience of shifting borders, and the cultural and social distinctions that attend the historical changes in Nigeria from the colonial era to the present. This study provides insights that can potentially enlarge the scope of border studies from the perspective of the humanities and recast the traditional assumption of the border as a fixed geographical divide. Most importantly, my thesis argues for border inclusivity, achievable through a radical delinking from the mentality of superiority and fixity. It suggests an expanded notion of difference as part of a solution to the crisis of cultural and symbolic othering in Africa, and in the world at large.