Yunusy Castory Ng'umbi

Africa as a geo-political space has been experiencing a number of challenges in exercising its autonomy. Among those challenges include the continued civil wars, different forms of instability and their accompanied mayhems such as migration, exile, refugeeism, and fragmentation of the institution of the family. Through such underlying forces, the post-colonial subject is subjected to various intersecting dilemmas in terms of socio-cultural identity. This proposed study, using African feminism and post-colonial framework, aims at examining how literature enters such socio-cultural and political spaces in order to interrogate the dynamics of identity construction in the post-colonial state. In a monograph form that comes from my Ph.D thesis, the study will specifically examine how twenty-first century African women writers from East and West Africa represent the institution of family in a way that challenges their older generation counterparts and Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi's theory of black womanism.