Colonial Education, Language, and the Nervous Condition: Tambudazi’s Postcolonial Bildungsroman in Nervous Conditions
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.58445/rars.2976Keywords:
Literature, Postcolonial, Education, Language, Bildungsroman, Nervous ConditionsAbstract
This research essay will explore the relationship between formal education and the learning of English within colonial structures in Tsitsi Dangarembga's novel Nervous Conditions (1988), focusing in particular on how the adult narrator's sociocultural sensibilities guide her retrospective narration of her childhood and her journey to whom she ultimately becomes. In addition to reading and responding to literary criticism of the novel, this essay explores the postcolonial Bildungsroman as a genre and the novel's relationship to Frantz Fanon's psychoanalytic theory of the colonized subject in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), from which Dangarembga draws her title.
References
Dangarembga, Tsitsi. Nervous Conditions. 1988. Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2004.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. 1961. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: James Currey; Nairobi: Heinemann, 1986.
Sartre, Jean‑Paul. “Preface.” The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon. 1961. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963, 7–31.
Slaughter, Joseph R. Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007.
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