Voice, Silence, and Narrative Authority in Nigerian Women’s Autobiography: From Colonial Mission Girls to Contemporary Digital Life Writing

This dissertation examines the development of Nigerian women's autobiography as a literary genre, tracing its emergence from colonial-era mission school education, through print publication in the post-independence period, to contemporary digital life writing and memoir, and developing an original theory of female narrative authority and its relationship to the management of voice and silence in Nigerian women's self-representational texts. Women's autobiography in Nigeria has been shaped by the same colonial, patriarchal, and religious forces that have constrained women's public voice more broadly, and the literary strategies through which Nigerian women have claimed, constructed, and defended narrative authority in their life writing offer a rich site for gender studies and literary history research. The dissertation develops an original theoretical framework drawing on feminist life writing theory, postcolonial autobiography studies, African feminist criticism, and digital media autobiography scholarship. The framework is applied across a corpus of 30 Nigerian women's autobiographical texts spanning from 1930 to 2023, including mission school memoirs, national political autobiographies, feminist literary memoirs, and digital personal essay and blog collections. Analytical attention focuses on the construction of female autobiographical authority, the strategic deployment of silence about contested or dangerous material, the negotiation of communal Nigerian identity expectations within an individually voiced narrative, and the differences between print and digital self-representational strategies. Original contributions include a theory of Nigerian women's autobiographical authority, a literary history of the genre, and a framework for reading strategic silence in women's life writing. Keywords: autobiography, Nigerian women's writing, narrative authority, life writing, gender and literature.