Contracts with the World: Redefining Home, Identity and Community in Aidoo, Brodber, Garner and Rule

Abstract

The re-emergence of the women’s movement in the seventies has drawn renewed attention to writing by women throughout the Commonwealth. A feminist focus on women’s shared experiences under patriarchy may underplay other experiences of oppression important to women in formerly colonised countries or it may too easily equate them. The weakness of some contemporary feminist theory lies in the problems resulting from failure to link an analysis of power relations based on gender with those based on ethnicity and class. Yet linking them is also problematic. The strength of much writing by women novelists throughout the English-speaking post-colonial world lies in its explorations of these linkages. These women’s novels remind us of the complicating differences that nation, class or race bring to the already problematic and culturally specific construction of gender. Such an awareness of complicating differences requires new concepts of form and language that stretch the resources of the novel to renew its relation to the world.