Imbrications among literature, history, and feminism:

a reading proposal for contemporary feminine authorship African novels

Abstract

From an imbricated approach between literary criticism, history and feminist theories, it is possible to perform a committed reading of literary works from the African continent, especially those produced by the women in contemporary times. Moreover, the dialectical relationship allows to analyze how a literary criticism committed to all aspects can contribute to the analytical formulations of female authorship literature on the African continent. Even more, it is necessary to understand the real conditions of literary production regarding to the writers, while they are precisely in the trenches of the current capitalist system. So, it is by the imbricated bias between literature, history and feminisms, that the exercise of literary analysis will focus on how these women, in the exercise of fiction and the construction of characters in their trajectories within the narratives, express themselves, oppose themselves and denounce the material conditions under which they live. Thus, there is a proposal for the imbricated reading of the novels O alegre canto da perdiz, by Paulina Chiziane, Everything good will come by Sefi Atta, and Do not go gentle, by Futhi Ntshingila, always starting from the literary text so that the social, historical and feminist ideologies reveal themselves in the texture of their own works.
Keywords: African literatures; comparative literature; feminism; history; feminine authorship.