remembering home: nation and identity in the recent writing of Doris Lessing

In the UK, the writing of Doris Lessing has frequently been associated with left-wing politics and the second-wave feminist movement. Critics have concentrated primarily on issues of class and gender and have focused their attention on novels published in the 1950s and 1960s. This essay suggests that Lessing's work is over-ripe for reassessment in relation to ideas from post-colonial theory. Her writing repeatedly addresses questions about national identity and its imbrications with ‘race’. These ideas intersect in complex ways with her more familiar analysis of gender and class. This essay discusses Lessing's recent novel The Sweetest Dream (2001), which was widely read as an attack on the political idealism of the 1960s. It relates the novel to her collection of essays, African Laughter (1992), her recent essay on the situation in Zimbabwe, ‘The Jewel of Africa’ (2003) and the second volume of her autobiography, Walking in the Shade (1997). Zimbabwe (previously Southern Rhodesia) is of crucial importance in these works. The article explores how Lessing makes use of notions of city, home and memory that can be instructively compared with some of Toni Morrison's ideas in her novel Beloved (1987) and the essays ‘Home’ (1998) and ‘The Site of Memory’ (1990). Lessing revises the notion of ‘home’ so that it becomes capable of both recognizing racial and national differences and moving outside them. She also interprets memory as productive for the individual and the nation only when it becomes, as Morrison would say, ‘rememory’: when it can acknowledge the importance of imagination in dealing with trauma and thus suggest the fluctuating, mobile status of identity. The article demonstrates that similar ideas about home and memory are present in her fiction, essay and autobiography, indicating that her intention is to explore generic classification and blur the boundaries between different methods of writing personal and political history. Lessing's work strongly suggests the possibility that apparently ‘fictional’ writings may be more fruitful than ostensibly factual ones in allowing individuals and nations to make sense of their immediate pasts.     

Touring a once pious nation: gender,medievalism, tourism,and Catholic nation-building in early twentieth-century France

ABSTRACT

In 1900, the first of the Guide national et catholique du voyageur en France appeared. Published by the Assumptionist Order alongside the Exposition Universelle, the guidebook suggested sites for Catholic travellers visiting Paris that year. Additional volumes on other regions of France soon followed. Known for their national pilgrimages to Lourdes, the Assumptionists departed here from their usual publications by presenting a religious travel experience based on curiosity more than faith, yet motivated by nostalgia for a medieval, pious France; a nation anchored in its regional traditions. Central to the guidebooks were female religious personalities—saint, visionaries, and miracle workers—who reflected this idealized vision of the nation. Using the lens of gender, this article explores the Guide's use of female religious figures and Marian apparitions in the construction of a Catholic nation to be explored, reaffirmed, and travelled at the beginning of the twentieth century.     

Elspeth Huxley: gender,empire and narratives of nation, 1935-64

Abstract

This article explores the impact of empire on narratives of the British nation during a period of decline of British colonial rule through a study of Elspeth Huxley's successive reworkings of such narratives between 1935 and 1964. It sets Huxley's work in the context of post-1945 anxieties about national decline and their connections with the loss of imperial power, and looks at the difficulties surrounding the articulation of national identity as virile and masculine in post-imperial Britain. Although anxieties about masculinities were often addressed through a misogynistic discourse which showed women emasculating men, Huxley's work suggests the significance of a counter-theme. It indicates not only her own attachment to an imperial identity but also the ways in which this continued to be articulated in the midtwentieth century as an identity with a wide appeal to a metropolitan audience, and one through which women could be incorporated into the story of nation. In exploring the terms of this incorporation, the article considers the opportunities open to women to claim to embody exemplary national qualities through the figure of the doughty, intrepid, imperial female pioneer, and the particular resonance and appeal this figure acquired in the context of the end of empire.     

Narratives of race and nation in china: Women's suffrage in the early twentieth century

This paper explores the ways in which the Chinese women's suffrage movement used racializing narratives to alter the boundaries that had excluded women from full participation in politics in the first two decades of the 20th century. It extends existing work on the connection between narratives of race and women's suffrage in countries such as Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the USA to explore how “race” was mobilized in China in the late-Qing and early Republican period. The article has three main areas of innovation. First, it explores the deployment of racializing narratives within the broader discourses of modernity circulating in China wherein modernization was premised on a racialized notion of national identity—that is “modernization as Han chauvinism.” Second, this article aims to participate in the process of extending the history of women's suffrage from primary reliance on class analysis and towards methods that explore the multiple categories of exclusion and inclusion. Third, this article aims to explore the manner in which narratives of race were invoked within a feminist political campaign that occurred in a nation without a history of European colonization. The article demonstrates that the multiplicity of possible gains sought under the banner of “race” makes it an unreliable category to invoke for struggles that are ultimately determined by “gendered” divisions.     

gendered embodiments: mapping the body-politic of the raped woman and the nation in Bangladesh

Feminist Review - There has been much academic work outlining the complex links between women and the nation. Women provide legitimacy to the political projects of the nation in particular social...     

Hearts of Darkness: white women write race

Abstract

In an effort to popularise the gas stove, boost sales and minimize the genuine and perceived dangers of using this volatile domestic appliance, late Victorian gas managers and stove manufacturers employed female cookery teachers to perform public demonstrations at trade exhibitions throughout the country. Eventually, these women comprised a special department of gas sales, calling directly on customers in their homes to offer personal instruction in the proper use and care of gas stoves. Part social workers, part salesgirls, the ‘lady demons’, short for lady demonstrators, moved between the traditionally gendered separate spheres of work and home, consciously constructing a professional image that reconciled the social tensions of this new occupation. They offer an early example of women's entrance into the corporate business world, the feminisation of consumption, and the combination of customer service with social welfare.