Gender on the Post-colony: Phenomenology, Race, and the Body in Nervous Conditions

This chapter explores the ways in which racialized bodies are re-presented through a phenomenological analysis of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions. In order to situate the body within gendered and racialized narratives, the authors consider three key assertions. First, gender is itself a colonial construct, and postcolonial accounts of Blackness have often been elided in feminist narratives. Second, drawing on Mbembe’s concept of “necropolitics” and Fanon’s thesis on the impossibility of Black becoming, it can be said that the “body” itself becomes a key site for analyzing racialized bodies, highlighting the uneasy hierarchies of race and gender in this regard. And third, 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.