... to achieve in their writing. On the other hand, the novel consistently subordinates African culture to the psychological drama of Henderson's (and perhaps “America's”) midlife crisis. I turn to a reading of Bessie Head's 1965 story “The Woman from America,” in which the friendship between Head's Botswanan...

... endings function not as closure or completion but as thresholds to sustainability. This essay ends with two twentieth‐century fictions—Bessie Head's 1974 A Question of Power and Leslie Feinberg's 1993 Stone Butch Blues —that conclude by combining the pleasures of material predictability and plenty...

... of the book elaborates this thesis through readings of works by black women writers from the 70s and 80s-Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Toni Cade Bambara, and Bessie Head; in the second half, Taylor uses the insights of these texts to revisit modernist works by William Faulkner, Gertrude...

... Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) to sort out the causal relationship between dignity and human rights. Coetzee registers the affront to dignity first. Claiming rights follows as an effort to redress this affront. In a similar vein, Bessie Head (another writer scarred by apartheid) declared...

... parodic, is likely to be far less subjective than objective." Far less prose has consequently been devoted to the angst of characters produced by modernist writers Bessie Head and Dambudzo Marechera, than to Ben Okri, Sony Labou Tansi, or Henri Lopes. Each essay in this collection engages...

... that “Maria can tell them about how some of the blue-shirted crusaders for the true faith sat on her head while others twisted her arms and pulled her skirts up and stuffed them in her mouth” (164–65). The only way in which the romance plot of the novel, and the intimacy projected through it, could possibly...