Kvinnor, vithet, och de andras litteratur

Abstract

In her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” – originally published in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg’s Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (1988), Gayatri Spivak puts the colonial logic in words through the formulation “White men are saving brown women from brown men”. She claims further that nowadays it is not only men who are engaged in this business. In this article I read the reception and paratexts of African literature in Swedish translation, more specifically: how are female African authors and their works discussed in a Swedish context, and how do colonial patterns (such as the one Spivak has formulated) structure the discourses about these literatures? And how can one understand these discourses from an intersectional perspective, with sexuality and whiteness as the main intersections?