Transnational Complications: Reimagining Oroonoko and Women’s Collective Politics in the Empire

New dialogic spaces of transhistorical feminist rethinking emerge when women writers from earlier colonial eras are brought into conversations with contemporary feminist critics, especially those with transnational and common-front visions around issues of social justice. Engaging Aphra Behn in conv...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Frontiers (Boulder) 2015, Vol.36 (1), p.33-56
Main Author: Deb, Basuli
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Alliances
Behn, Aphra (1640-1689)
Boundaries
British & Irish literature
Colonialism
Conversation
Criticism
Empires
English literature
Females
Feminism
Governors
Homosexuality
Literary criticism
Narratives
Nobility
Novels
Politics
Postcolonialism
Reading
Seventeenth Century
Slave trade
Transnationalism
Women
Writers
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:New dialogic spaces of transhistorical feminist rethinking emerge when women writers from earlier colonial eras are brought into conversations with contemporary feminist critics, especially those with transnational and common-front visions around issues of social justice. Engaging Aphra Behn in conversation with Gayatri Spivak, Lata Mani, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Chandra Mohanty, Jenny Sharpe, Avery Gordon, and Stephanie Camp, this paper makes an argument for a more nuanced account of colonial power relations by reopening the question of women's solidarity across political and cultural boundaries in Aphra Behn's novella Oroonoko. It challenges a host of criticism invested in focusing on the differences between Behn's female narrator and her female protagonist, Imoinda. Instead this essay recognizes the different social locations of the two and yet examines how a desire for a protofeminist transnational politics between the imperial woman writer-narrator and the colonial subject in the seventeenth century had the potential to rupture the narrative of slavery.
ISSN:0160-9009
1536-0334
1536-0334
DOI:10.1353/fro.2015.a576870