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

"Isabella Villanova’s study moves beyond traditional paradigms of resistance to reveal how selfhood and community are mutually constitutive within African women’s writing. Her meticulous readings connect local contexts to transnational feminist debates with clarity and sophistication. This work stands as an important and timely contribution to scholarship on African feminism and gendered agency."

—Professor Chielozona Eze, Carleton College, United States

"How do we wrap our heads around the enigmatic tapestry of expansive possibilities and Sisyphean impossibilities that frame African women’s lifeworlds? This timely cross-generational reflection on the lives and thought of four canonical African women writers offers some pointers. Isabella Villanova’s cross-regional reading offers fresh insights into the still-urgent question of the forms of agency, resistance and world-making that African women enact."

—Professor Grace A. Musila, Department of African Literature, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

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.