Mofaramade Atanda

Language and Identity in Tsitsi Dangarembga's _Nervous Conditions_

Started Sept. 26, 2024

Abstract or project description

This research essay explores the relationship between formal education and the learning of English within colonial structures in Tsitsi Dangarembga's novel Nervous Conditions (1988), focusing in particular on how the adult narrator's socio-cultural sensibilities guide her retrospective narration of her childhood and her journey to whom she ultimately becomes. In addition to reading and responding to literary criticism of the novel, possible research directions include examining the (postcolonial) Bildungsroman as a genre and and the novel's relationship to Frantz Fanon's psychoanalytic theory of the colonized subject in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), from which Dangarembga draws her title.