Mother Africa, Father Marx

Women's Writing of Mozambique, 1948-2002

Hilary Owen (Ed.)

2007
274 pages
ISBN 0838756573

This book is the first work in the English language to discuss the participation of women writers in the narrative construction of Mozambican nationhood over the last half-century. Covering the rise of anti-colonial nationalism in the 1950s, the advent of the Marxist-Leninist Republic in the 1970s, the war that followed independence in the 1980s, and the transition to democracy and the neo-liberal economy in the 1990s, the volume focuses on four representative women writers who belong to distinct but overlapping periods and work in different genres. Dealing with Noemia de Sousa's poetry, Lina Magaia's testimonial writings, Lilia Momple's short fiction, and Paulina Chiziane's novels, the result is a close reading of the ways in which women have narrated and counter-narrated Mozambican nationhood to take account of the gendered power relations that traditionally underpin national community as imagined by men.

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About the editor:

Hilary Owen is Professor of Portuguese at the University of Manchester. She holds a doctorate from the University of Nottingham, and is the author of Portuguese Women's Writing, 1972-1986: Reincarnations of a Revolution (2000) , and co-editor (with Philip Rothwell) of Sexual/Textual Empires: Gender and Marginality in Luscophone African Literature (2004). Professor Owen has published widely on modern Portuguese, Brazilian, and Mozambican women's writing and is particularly interested in the interface between feminist criticism and postcolonial theory in lusophone contexts. Her articles have bene published in Luso-Brazilian Review, Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies, Portuguese Studies, Ellipsis, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Index on Censorship, and Mea libra, among other journals.

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