From Dehumanization to Decolonization: Women’s Bodies, Memory, and Resistance in Postcolonial Literature

Abstract

Postcolonial literature repeatedly foregrounds women’s bodies and memories as crucial sites where colonial violence, cultural domination, and psychological dehumanization are enacted and resisted. While decolonization is often theorized in political, historical, or national terms, the gendered dimensions of colonial oppression—particularly the regulation of women’s bodies and the silencing of women’s memories—remain insufficiently examined. This paper argues that women’s bodies function as contested terrains of colonial power, where racialized, sexualized, and cultural control is imposed, and where acts of resistance and self-assertion emerge in postcolonial narratives. Drawing on postcolonial and feminist theoretical frameworks, particularly the works of Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Homi K. Bhabha, the study examines selected postcolonial literary texts to explore how memory operates as a counter-discursive force against colonial erasure. Through an analysis of embodied trauma, maternal memory, and narrative remembrance, the paper demonstrates how women reclaim agency by transforming personal suffering into collective historical consciousness. By foregrounding women’s lived experiences, the study reconceptualizes decolonization not merely as a political transition but as an ongoing ethical and cultural process rooted in the recovery of silenced voices. The paper thus contributes to postcolonial studies by highlighting the centrality of gendered memory and embodied resistance in challenging colonial and neo-colonial structures of power.