A Postcolonial Feminist Approach to Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women

Abstract

Postcolonial feminism, also known as Third World Feminism, is a form of feminism which is concerned with the representation of women in the countries that were once under the colonial rule of Britain. Postcolonial feminists study the way colonialism conditioned the lives of the third world women who experience the ‘double colonization’ in terms of both race and gender. The Book of Night Women (2009) is a novel by a Jamaican novelist Marlon James. The novel, a slave narrative, also represents the condition of black women under slavery and their struggle to resist the colonial oppression in terms of race, gender, sexuality, etc. James here very realistically depicts the relationship between the slaves and slave owners, and colonized and colonizers. The black women in the novel also witness the double colonization. Therefore, the paper attempts to explore the ways black women are being oppressed in the system of colonization which blends all types of oppressions such as race, gender, sexuality, class, etc to control and dominate them. The focus shall be also to explore their resistance against slavery and patriarchy.