Governing Intimacy: The Politics of Love in African Fiction Open Access
Hanggi, Kathleen Marie (2012)
Published
Abstract
Abstract
Governing Intimacy: The Politics of Love in African Fiction
This dissertation examines portrayals of love in Sub-Saharan
African fiction.
Employing Herbert Marcuse's discussion of liberated subjectivity in
The Aesthetic
Dimension, I contend that the private desires of the individual
offer insight into an
alternative future. I trace the aesthetic rendering of love and its
affective experience to
argue that a critical reading of love reveals the complex
negotiation the lover experiences
between personal desire, subjectivity, and the socio-political
order. Love is a critical site
for understanding subjectivity because it is rooted in feelings of
desire, but it also can
develop into a foundation for intimate relationships that develop
into socially-sanctioned
marriages. Thus, it begins as an impulse or desire outside of the
social order, but as it
develops, it becomes implicated in the socio-political sphere. My
analysis demonstrates
that through love relationships, characters discover who they are,
the world in which they
live, and what its limits are. Narratives of love also give rise to
the dream of a better
world. I show that subjectivity, although socially constructed, is
paradoxically a site of
resistance to the social order, and in African fiction, loving
relationships introduce the
possibility of a world rooted in humanity and social justice.
Although under-theorized in the field of African literary
criticism, love is a
prominent theme in African literature deserving of critical
attention. This project explores
a range of love relationships, including polygamous marriages and
interracial love under
apartheid, to uncover the various manifestations of the
individualization of the social
within heterosexual love relationships. A study of this scope is
long overdue and will
serve as a foundation for discussions of love and affect in African
literature. My
dissertation provides a sustained analysis of heteronormative
relationships and
demonstrates love is a valuable index for comprehending how the
affective dimension
functions in concert and conflict with the socio-political order
that shapes it.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Introduction
Falling in Love in African Fiction 1
Chapter One
Reading Love: Subjectivity, Desire, and the Nation 22
Chapter Two
"You wish the conditions in life were different": Love, Polygamy,
and
Refashioning the Self 57
Chapter Three
Parenthetical Closeness: Love Across the Color Bar in Nadine
Gordimer's Occasion for Loving 90
Chapter Four
The Power of Love: The Writing of Ngugi wa Thiong'o 115
Works Cited 161
About this Dissertation
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