Writing Postcoloniality: Nation and Women in Dogeaters

Abstract

Jessica Hagedorn's novel, Dogeaters, writes the history of a postcolonial nation and the lives of its marginalized spokespersons, especially women, and examines issues of identity, its devastation and tentative reconfiguration, both for the nation and its inhabitants. In a brutally honest and fragemented depiction, Hagedorn exposes the larger cultural ramifications of colonialism that stays on as a postcolonial sediment in the hybridized psyches of the colonized and in the neocolonial imperatives that direct the new ethos of nation-building. In a decentering, disjunctive, postcolonial narrative, Dogeaters daringly enacts these implications of colonization for nation and women and claims an implicit historic continuum between colonial power and nationalist endeavors.