The ambivalent narrator. Hybridity and multiple address as modernity in Maryse Condé and Mariama Bâ.

Abstract

'Verisimilitude, realism, positive images are the demands that women of colour make of their own writing as critical and political practice; white women demand instead simulation, textual performances, double displacements.' I Teresa de Lauretis argues here for differences between races particularly in respect to the centrality of the issue of personal identity. The importance of identity for writers from colonised cultures is considered to determine their preference for traditional realism. Realism would produce real, round, colored, individualised characters, in words characterising a culturally situated narrator. Postmodernism, on the other hand, stages a decentered linguistic subject, made not of flesh and blood, but of the ready-made words of others.