Introduction to Special Issue on Postcolonial Women's Writing and Material Religion: New Directions

Citation

Darroch F & Jasper A (2021) Introduction to Special Issue on Postcolonial Women's Writing and Material Religion: New Directions. Literature and Theology, 35 (4), pp. 379-382. https://doi.org/10.1093/litthe/frab030

Abstract
First paragraph: Within this special issue on postcolonial literature, we were keen to respond to expressions of materiality, or ‘material religion’/‘material culture’ that is often found within (the contested parameters of) postcolonial women’s writing. One of the recurrent joys of reading literature by writers such as Edwidge Danticat, Arundhati Roy, Shivanee Ramlochan, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (amongst countless others) is that everyday objects are imbued with meaning: they carry their own stories or capture history; these objects migrate with their owners and become a treasured symbol of survival and hope, or loss and grief but can also acquire new more layered meanings. The detailed description of the everyday and the mundane is an act of resistance in itself: it challenges imperial and patriarchal metaphors, such as the ways in which western culture and academic practice maintains women as the guardians of the everyday.

Keywords
Literature and Literary Theory; Religious studies

Journal
Literature and Theology: Volume 35, Issue 4