‘International Superstars’: Negotiation and Contradiction in Paratextual Constructions of Sub-Saharan African Female Authors’ Identities

Sammanfattning

This thesis explores discursive constructions of Sub-Saharan African female authors’ identities. Although the global publishing world brings local literature to a global audience, enabling local authors to profit from and operate within a larger market, it nevertheless creates a hegemonic understanding of local authors based on postcolonial ideas of the ‘Other’. Considering colonial patterns of homogenizing people from the ”Global South” and patriarchal structures that disregard women’s voices in storytelling, this thesis examines Sub-Saharan African female authors, focusing on how their identities are constructed within postcolonial, Western-dominated literary discourses and how they negotiate their identities while being represented as local authors within a global literary market. Paratexts contextualize a text within social practice, contributing to hegemonic discourses. Focusing on the discursive constructions of the identities of Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo currently based in the US, and Ugandan author Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi currently based in the UK, this thesis investigates the paratexts surrounding two fictional works by each author. The study employs a critical discourse analysis of paratexts, imbued with postcolonial scholar Mohanty’s antiracist feminist framework and Spivak’s theory of ‘Othering’. The results of this study show that dominant discourses construct Sub-Saharan African female authors through hegemonic narratives concerning their ‘global’ literature, altering paratexts and representing them by centralizing their intersectional identities rather than their literature. Global literary prizes are seen through Foucault’s discourse theory as institutions that play a large part in constructing the authors’ identities, sustaining a controlled form of critique against dominant discourses. Additionally, by exploring paratexts in which the authors themselves construct their identities, this thesis centralizes negotiation of identity, which communicates a connection to the authors’ home countries while gaining global recognition for their literature. Analyzing identity constructions through an antiracist feminist framework, this study distances itself from “Western feminism” and views the authors through a lens of agency.