Introduction

As a critique of the inventors and inventions of the margin, the volume urges the reader to rethink marginality by insisting that he/she listen carefully to “marginal discourses” as manifested by the silences and other patterns of articulation of the marginalized. To see knowledge, power, and agency in the margins is to wrestle with contradictions, and some essays in this volume articulate the possibilities of contradictions by recognizing the dilemma inherent in the weaving of individual histories and collective allegories/ mythologies and casting it within the context of the nation as “imagined community” (in the Andersonian context).3 More importantly, the essays examine how these “imaginings” are located, gendered, and politicized and, in addition, assess the potency of linguistic identity in defining the contours of the “imagined community.” R.Radhakrishnan forcefully argues for a rethinking of the complex relationship between women’s politics and nationalist politics, particularly the nature of “nationalist totality” and the legitimacy of its representation. Citing Partha Chatterjee, Radhakrishnan asserts that in “the ideology of nationalist politics…the women’s question… is constrained to take on a nationalist expression as a prerequisite for being considered “political” (78). But the truth of the matter is that most of the time (on the African continent, for example), nationalist politics depoliticizes women’s politics, forcing the repoliticization of women’s politics back on the national agenda only as an aftermath of nationalist struggles. Nonetheless, some of the essays in this volume echo the main arguments of Radhakrishnan’s essay in their examination of the centrality of women to the dilemma of identity formation in nationalist struggles (Charles Sugnet, Celeste Fraser Delgado, Uzo Esonwanne, and Cynthia Ward). The essays focus on, among other issues, what Radhakrishnan calls the “schizophrenic vision” of the rhetoric of nationalism in which “[w]oman becomes the allegorical name for a specific historical failure: the failure to coordinate the political or the ontological with the epistemological within an undivided agency” (85). In an earlier work, Trinh Minh-ha identifies this “schizophrenia” as the “obsessive fear of losing connection” in the search for and assertion of “authenticity” that relies on “undisputed origin” (Woman 94, emphasis in the original). Essays by Renée Larrier, Celeste Fraser Delgado, and Cynthia Ward locate this search for “undisputed origin” in identity formation in the mère-terre/Mother Africa/ Motherland/Mother Tongue tropes that pervade the literature, language question, and nationalist discourse in Africa.