Liminality in literature

This thesis argues that postcolonial women are doubly oppressed under colonialism and patriarchy. In many instances, women's acts of resistance are overlooked through discursive practices that erroneously portray women as passive victims. In order to correct this misrepresentation of women, Michelle Cliff chronicles women's oppression as well as their numerous acts of resistance in Abeng and No Telephone To Heaven. Cliff, thus, ruptures the colonial and patriarchal myths that render women powerless. Central to this thesis, is the argument that the liminal space is critical for empowerment and resistance. Liminality allows an individual to occupy two diverse worlds creating what Homi K. Bhabha calls a "Third Space." This Third Space offers migrant subjects such as Michelle Cliff a good vantage point from which to observe and record the oppression and resistance of the colonized. The thesis utilizes postcolonial theory to explicate the fragmented and contradictory experience of the colonized.

The state of liminality, as defined by Mihai Spariosu and exemplified by Wallace Stevens and Charles Baudelaire, is a significant one, transitional in its "structure," and one in which a vital activity takes place. Namely, this activity is the moving between worlds, states, or perceptions, and the choice of new ones, or of considering new potentialities. Essentially, this idea of being in limbo and the result of this state of "in-betweenness" is that we emerge from a relatively indeterminate, contemplative, and subjective space with an ultimate satisfaction or heightened or altered awareness. Much of Stevens's poetry, especially his later poetry, exemplifies a meditative contemplation of being, while Baudelaire's poetry portrays the liminally sublime, ghostly being in a transitional urban world. Both poets demonstrate such concepts of transition and ultimate coping in a modern state of flux.