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eBook details

• Title: Identities in Transition: The 1990 High Court Case and Unity Dow's the Heavens May Fall (Critical Essay)
• Author : Fetson Kalua
• Release Date : January 01, 2010
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 74 KB

Description

The argument in this article is that Unity Dow's court case of 1990 over citizenship laws in Botswana, as well as her fourth novel, The Heavens May Fall, deals with and exemplifies the concept of identities-in-transition or as a matter of becoming. In other words, both the court case and the novel not only challenge cultural constructions of the subject but also articulate the mobility of cultural formations in the modern, globalised world. In particular, The Heavens May Fall constructs the idea of culture as no longer based on (African) tradition which assigns subject-positions based on such fluid categories as gender but rather on the constituted and ever-constituting concept of modernity, in this case read as postmodernity,--"a major transition in human history" (Anderson 1995: 7) characterised by our "emerging from out of the security of our tribes, traditions, religions and worldviews into a global civilization that is dazzlingly, overwhelmingly pluralistic" (p. 8). In the context of The Heavens May Fall, for example, modernity and postmodernity are revealed through the patent ideals of enlightenment and modernisation/urbanisation--the legal system, technology, language, dress, to mention just a few examples. Read through Homi Bhabha's version of the postcolonial, all four of Unity Dow's novels hold up to question the ways in which we southern Africans or Africans (in particular black Africans) have perceived and continue to perceive identities in oppositional categories and straitjacket ways. Dow's fiction reflects her own vision of a changing world and enables the reader to gain an acute awareness of the instability of language, the social construction of reality, and hence the fact that identity can no longer be perceived simplistically. As Homi Bhabha, renowned scholar in the field of postcolonial theory, writes,

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