Identity and Exclusion in Devarakshanam Govinden’s Sister Outsiders

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Govinden’s Sister Outsiders. The Representation of Identity and Difference in Selected Writings by South African Indian Women (2008) is propelled by the general gynocritical activity that considers exclusionary practices in literary historiography globally. She draws the contours of the critical landscape in which writings by black women have generally been excluded. The notion of minor literatures is political; Indian women writers are barely recognised in the South African literary historiography given that historically, race, ethnicity, and identity under an intransigent and repressive white regime assumed particular importance. Discursive practices that were ignored, marginalised, or even “unknown” in the past are now being excavated, as is reflected in Indian women’s writings in Sister Outsiders. The writings are not only significant in signalling local discursive issues, but their significance may be gauged by the resonance they have with postcolonial writings in general, where neocolonial domination, dispossession and cultural fragmentation, belonging, and the crises of identity are foregrounded. The writers considered in Sister Outsiders are Ansuyah Singh, Muthal Naidoo, Zuleikha Mayat, Phyllis Naidoo, Agnes Sam, Kesaveloo Goonam, Farida Karodia, and Fatima Meer. The latter part of this article focuses specifically on Fatima Meer’s notion of identity, exclusion, and belonging.