While the male-dominated Francophone African migrant literary tradition
includes women writers, there is no study that attends to this subgroup
of writers. The Pull of Postcolonial Nationhood: Gender and Migration in
Francophone African Literatures pioneers the study of these writers as a
category through an examination of three major women who exemplify the
Francophone African female migrant literary tradition: Ken Bugul,
Calixthe Beyala, and Fatou Diome. By studying these women together, Ayo
A. Coly innovatively introduces gender into prevailing theories of
Francophone African migrant literatures. These theories, in line with
the current surge of postnationalism in cultural criticism, claim that
questions of home and nationhood are obsolete for the present generation
of Francophone African migrant writers, but this book shows that the
opposite is true in the texts of these writers. Coly is thus able to
demonstrate how claims of postnationalism are often skewed by
gender-blind understandings of nationalism, namely a failure to consider
that women have traditionally been the sites for discourses and
practices of nationalism. Amid the negative currency of home and nation
in contemporary cultural criticism, including postcolonial criticism,
this book contends that home remains a politically, ideologically, and
emotionally loaded matter for postcolonial subjects.
