In this thesis, I examine Palestinian women writers and their contributions to resistance writing. I argue that contemporary Palestinian women's writings significantly contribute to social justice movements concerned with “resistance.” This thesis defines resistance as a continual political movement that calls upon the oppressed people to unite and fight against social injustices and imperialism. While coming out of Palestinian women's writing, this definition is not limited to just the struggle for Palestinian justice but may be applicable across the current movement for social justice. I also argue that women’s contributions to resistance writing are greatly underrepresented by scholars who analyze and produce publications on the topic of resistance literature, primarily focusing their analyses on men’s writings and how they contribute to the movement. This thesis expands on the notion that Third World feminist consciousness was able to advance and thrive with nationalism. In doing so, I argue against Western assumptions that feminism cannot coincide with nationalism in a society that practices patriarchal traditions. Resistance literature written by women not only reinforces the idea of liberation and nationalism as seen in writings by their male counterparts, but it expands and reconfigures this literary form by combining their patriarchal oppressions and feminist perspectives with their anti-colonial agendas. I analyze the literary works of two Palestinian women novelists, Sahar Khalifeh and Susan Abulhawa, and how their novels promote nationalism and feminism, campaigning for displaced Palestinians affected by colonial-induced conflict. By highlighting these key issues Palestinians faced during the diaspora, both authors successfully advocate for women's empowerment and the Palestinian people's liberation.

James Joyce is located between, and constructed within, two worlds: the national and international, the political and cultural systems of colonialism and postcolonialism. Joyce's political project is to construct a postcolonial contra-modernity: to write the incommensurable differences of colonial, postcolonial, and gendered subjectivities, and, in doing so, to reorient the axis of power and knowledge. What Joyce dramatizes in his hybrid writing is the political and cultural remainder of imperial history or patriarchal canons: a remainder that resists assimilation into the totalizing narratives of modernity. Through this remainder - of both politics and the psyche - Joyce reveals how a minority culture can construct political and personal agency. Joyce: Feminism / Post / Colonialism, edited by Ellen Carol Jones, bears witness to the construction of that agency, tracing the inscription of the racial and sexual other in colonial, nationalist, and postnational representations, deciphering the history of the possible. Contributors are Gregory Castle, Gerald Doherty, Enda Duffy, James Fairhall, Peter Hitchcock, Ellen Carol Jones, Ranjana Khanna, Patrick McGee, Marilyn Reizbaum, Susan de Sola Rodstein, Carol Shloss, and David Spurr.

DIVExplores the relation of gender and nation in postcolonial writing about India./div

This text combines Boehmer's keynote essays on the mother figure and the postcolonial nation, with incisive new work on male autobiography, 'daughter' writers, the colonial body, the trauma of the post-colony, and the nation in a transnational context.

Feminist Nationalism demonstrates how feminism is redefining nationalism by presenting case studies from Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and the Americas. Consisting of social movements and cultural ideologies, feminist nationalism links struggles for women's rights with struggles for group identity rights and/or national sovereignty in their goals of self-determination. Many analyses of nationalism assume it is identical for women and men in its definition and operation. This collection challenges that framework by placing women at the center and demonstrating how feminism is redefining nationalism both in particular cases and in the global context.

An examination of nationalism and gender.

Elleke Boehmer's work on the crucial intersections between independence, nationalism and gender has already proved canonical in the field. 'Stories of women' combines her keynote essays on the mother figure and the postcolonial nation, with incisive new work on male autobiography, 'daughter' writers, the colonial body, the trauma of the post-colony, and the nation in a transnational context. Focusing on Africa as well as South Asia, and sexuality as well as gender, Boehmer offers fine close readings of writers ranging from Achebe, Okri and Mandela to Arundhati Roy and Yvonne Vera, shaping these into a critical engagement with theorists of the nation such as Fredric Jameson and Partha Chatterjee. Moving beyond cynical deconstructions of the post-colony, the book mounts a reassessment of the post-colonial nation as a site of potential empowerment, as a 'paradoxical refuge' in a globalised world. It acts on its own impassioned argument that post-colonial and nation-state studies address substantively issues hitherto raised chiefly within international feminism.