Browsing by Author "Barends, Heidi"

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    Race, gender and empire: transnational and transracial feminism in the first novels of Pauline Hopkins and Olive Schreiner
    (2015) Barends, Heidi; Collis-Buthelezi, Victoria J
    White South African author Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) and African American author Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859-1930) are well-known and celebrated literary figures in their own right, but are seldom read side by side. Furthermore, these authors and their works are traditionally placed on different spectrums of feminist literary genealogies despite writing during a similar time-frame and sharing converging feminist agendas. This thesis analyses The Story of an African Farm (1883), Schreiner’s first completed novel, alongside Hopkins’ first full-length novel, the romance Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900). Individually, these novels and their authors do radical work in liberating their female characters from the patriarchal and racial oppression prevalent in each context. This thesis argues that reading the two in tandem offers unique insight into a specifically transnational and transracial feminist consciousness emerging at the turn of the nineteenth century. Identifying multiple links between the novels’ feminist concerns and their intersecting negotiations with race and empire, this comparative literary study establishes temporal, spatial and conceptual links between the two works, arguing that these links transcend both the space and race of their novels’ local contexts in order to suggest a definitive transnational and transracial feminist awareness. Such a reading moreover disrupts traditional genealogies of western feminism, urging scholars to look beyond the narrow scope of feminist “waves” and schools in order to detect nuances, convergences and relationships between texts which such genealogies disregard.
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    "The dream ends there": transnational feminist negotiations in Pauline E. Hopkins and Olive Schreiner
    (2018) Barends, Heidi; Collis-Buthelezi, Victoria
    This dissertation investigates the African American writer, Pauline E. Hopkins (1859-1930), and the white South African writer, Olive Schreiner (1855-1920). Although Hopkins and Schreiner wrote at the same time, inhabited settler-colonial contexts (the United States and South Africa) that can in many respects be seen as similar, and shared an investment in gender and race activism, they are rarely associated with each other. This thesis examines the connections between them, illuminating a historical moment in which a transnational feminism was both in the making and a historical impossibility. Drawing from Schreiner’s and Hopkins’s literary work and archives, I use transnational feminist analysis, literary analysis, and feminist and black feminist theory to interrogate the ways in which these two writers defined, endorsed and contested the notion of female solidarity. I trace the authors’ thoughts on race, class and gender over the course of their lives, examining the historical moment of their connections in the light of their nonfiction and fiction. I conclude that, while never meeting, Hopkins and Schreiner moved in similar transnational and cross-racial circles, a symptom of both the possibilities and impossibilities of transnational and cross-racial solidarity. Their non-fiction lays bare the frictions between black and white women in the United States and South Africa; on the other hand, the imaginative capacity of their fiction offered both Hopkins and Schreiner a space in which to tease out these conflicts and to expand their feminist visions. Without promoting any notion of universal sisterhood, I argue that viewing Hopkins and Schreiner in tandem underscores their connectedness. Both authors made attempts to bridge the contemporary social divisions between women in service of a more inclusive feminist project. Attempt is the operative word, for neither writer was able to conceive of such a feminist project in its entirety. Nevertheless, their efforts to do so demonstrate the affinities that may exist between figures conventionally considered to be socially separated; they also emphasise the political urgencies of a transnational feminism, urgencies that I propose extend into our present.