Ch4. Gender on the Post-Colony: Phenomenology, Race and the Body in Nervous Conditions
Sweta Rajan-Rankin is Senior Lecturer at the School of Social Policy Sociology and Social Research (SSPSSR), Division of Law Society and Social Justice at the University of Kent. Her research investigates embodiment and racialized belongings in a range of areas, including transnational service work, migration and bordering, and new materialisms and Black identity. By bringing together post-colonial imaginaries and embodiment, her work explores historically situated understandings of citizenship, identity, and belonging among marginal communities. She has served as Director of the Migration, Ethnicity, Race and Belonging research cluster, co-convenor of the British Sociological Association (BSA) Race Ethnicity Study Group, and is an editorial board member of Sociological Review.
Related Co-author with Mrinalini Greedharry
This chapter explores the ways in which racialized bodies are re-presented through a phenomenological analysis of Tsitsi Dangaremgba’s Nervous Conditions. In order to situate the body within gendered and racialized narratives, the authors consider three key assertions. First, that gender is itself a colonial construct and postcolonial accounts of Blackness have often been elided in feminist narratives. Second, by drawing on Mbembe’s concept of “necropolitics” and Fanon’s thesis on the impossibility of Black becoming, the “body” itself becomes a key site for analyzing racialized bodies, highlighting the uneasy hierarchies of race and gender in this regard. And third, that in order to move beyond exceptionalist framings of Blackness–whiteness as binaries, keen attention must be paid to the literary offerings of women of color. Nervous Conditions provides a powerful foil to explore these assumptions through the narratives of two young African girls and their ambivalent relationship with Blackness and modernity. The body serves as the final frontier on which the necropolitics of the post-colony are played out in struggle. The intermingling of race, gender, memory, and presence bring together a fresh gaze by which the phenomenological understanding of the racialized body can be uncovered.
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For updates from the author and access to supplemental materials (interviews, podcasts, syllabi, etc.) when they are made available, please visit Chapter 4.
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