Contextualizing Female Identifications and the Politics of Otherness in Black Female Writings

Perhaps … ‘woman is not a determinable identity. Perhaps woman is not something which announces itself from a distance, at a distance from some other thing … Perhaps woman – a non-identity, non-figure, a simulacrum – a distance’s very chasm, the out-distancing of distance, the interval’s cadence, distance itself (Derrida 49).

Jaques Derrida, the Algerian-born French post-structuralist, in the above, delineates categories that woman, as an entity or otherwise, can be studied. In spite of poststructuralism’s emphasis on the contingent and discursive nature of all identities (Randall 116), and the jettisoning of female essentialism, where essentialism expounds the view that objects have some attributes that are necessary to their identity (Cartwright 620), this paper is premised on the notion that the category of woman is neither a universal nor a generic entity. To argue otherwise would present the category of woman as lacking verisimilitude.

Keywords: Contextualizing Female Identifications Politics Black Female Writings

Author

• Iniobong Uko
  Department of English
  University of Uyo