The PhD candidate of the program Construction and Representation of Cultural Identities (CRIC) Cynthia Lytle will defend her doctoral dissertation, supervised by Rodrigo Andrés (Centre Dona i Literatura) and Sue Ballyn (Australian Studies Centre, UB), entitled “DeraciNation: Reading the Borderlands in the Fiction of Zoë Wicomb”. The dissertation analyzes the political dimension of the writings of South African writer and academic Zoë Wicomb through the lens of two theoretical tools: the concept of “DeraciNation” (which finds its origins in the work of both Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou on dislocation and nation) and the concept of “Borderland” (from Gloria Anzaldúa's work on the frontier, liminality and hybridities). The dissertation reveals the imperialist discursive constructs on “race” which forged, before apartheid, the creation of a community denominated “coloured”. Lytle analyzes key nodes in the construction of this community such as “home”, “the neighbor” and “nation”, and demonstrates that Wicomb's work opens the way for non-patriarchal, non-nationalistic and non-racist discourses in the regeneration of this and of other communities that may contribute to the construction of personal liberties and of pluralism in the new South Africa.
