Download or read book Feminism and Modernity in Anglophone African Women s Writing written by Dobrota Pucherová and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-07-29 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book re-reads the last 60 years of Anglophone African women’s writing from a transnational and trans-historical feminist perspective, rather than postcolonial, from which these texts have been traditionally interpreted. Such a comparative frame throws into relief patterns across time and space that make it possible to situate this writing as an integral part of women’s literary history. Revisiting this literature in a comparative context with Western women writers since the 18th century, the author highlights how invocations of "tradition" have been used by patriarchy everywhere to subjugate women, the similarities between women’s struggles worldwide, and the feminist imagination it produced. The author argues that in the 21st century, African feminism has undergone a major epistemic shift: from a culturally exclusive to a relational feminism that conceptualizes African femininity through the risky opening of oneself to otherness, transculturation, and translation. Like Western feminists in the 1960s, contemporary African women writers are turning their attention to the female body as the prime site of women’s oppression and freedom, reframing feminism as a demand for universal human rights and actively shaping global discourses on gender, modernity, and democracy. The book will be of interest to students and researchers of African literature, but also feminist literary scholars and comparatists more generally.

Download or read book Ethics and Human Rights in Anglophone African Women s Literature written by Chielozona Eze and published by Palgrave MacMillan. This book was released on 2019-01-10 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A remarkable work, both for its compassion and critical insights, Chielozona Eze's Ethics and Human Rights in Anglophone African Women's Literature Feminist Empathy 'liberates' empathy from ideology and offers a focused way of reading literature within and across borders that also transcends limiting contexts.' -Maik Nwosu, University of Denver, USA 'In a thus far unsurpassed "sharing of affect," Professor Eze artfully deploys what he calls "feminist empathy" for third-generation Anglophone African women writers. In the wake of their foremothers' rejection of the double yoke of colonialism and patriarchy, this millennial generation of women writers reclaims "a body of their own" and its unaccountable pain. Eze's bold yet gentle gesturing towards these new female subjectivities makes him a male feminist, definitely a rare commodity on the Nigerian scene. His book is a high risk/high gain venture opening wide the portal of "human flourishing" for other African empathizers in the post-nation-state.' -Chantal Zabus, author of Between Rites and Rights: Excision in Women's Experiential Texts and Human Contexts, Université Paris 13 - Sorbonne Paris Cité, France 'Eze deftly demonstrates how contemporary African writing by women deploys feminist empathy to link ethics and human rights in a fresh interpretation of ubuntu -- the African philosophy of individual and community interdependence. With nuance and a rare attention to not only fiction but also poetry, essays and new media, Eze shows how recent works extending longstanding African feminist theories into new territory, proving Adichie and her sister-authors right: we should all be feminists.' -Tsitsi Jaji, author of Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music and Pan-African Solidarity and Associate Professor of English, Duke University, USA This book proposes feminist empathy as a model of interpretation in the works of contemporary Anglophone African women writers. The African woman's body is often portrayed as having been disabled by the patriarchal and sexist structures of society. Returning to their bodies as a point of reference, rather than the postcolonial ideology of empire, contemporary African women writers demand fairness and equality. By showing how this literature deploys imaginative shifts in perspective with women experiencing unfairness, injustice, or oppression because of their gender, Chielozona Eze argues that by considering feminist empathy, discussions open up about how this literature directly addresses the systems that put them in disadvantaged positions. This book, therefore, engages a new ethical and human rights awareness in African literary and cultural discourses, highlighting the openness to reality that is compatible with African multi-ethnic, multi-racial, and increasingly cosmopolitan communities.

Download or read book African Women Writers and the Politics of Gender written by Sadia Zulfiqar and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-09-23 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work examines the work of a group of African women writers who have emerged over the last forty years. While figures such as Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri and Wole Soyinka are likely to be the chief focus of discussions of African writing, female authors have been at the forefront of fictional interrogations of identity formation and history. In the work of authors such as Mariama Bâ (Senegal), Buchi Emecheta (Nigeria), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria), Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe), and Leila Aboulela (Sudan), there is a clear attempt to subvert the tradition of male writing where the female characters are often relegated to the margins of the culture, and confined to the domestic, private sphere. This body of work has already generated a significant number of critical responses, including readings that draw on gender politics and colonialism, but it is still very much a minor literature, and most mainstream western feminism has not sufficiently processed it. The purpose of this book is three-fold. First, it draws together some of the most important and influential African women writers of the post-war period and looks at their work, separately and together, in terms of a series of themes and issues, including marriage, family, polygamy, religion, childhood, and education. Second, it demonstrates how African literature produced by women writers is explicitly and polemically engaged with urgent political issues that have both local and global resonance: the veil, Islamophobia and a distinctively African brand of feminist critique. Third, it revisits Fredric Jameson’s claim that all third-world texts are “national allegories” and considers these novels by African women in relation to Jameson’s claim, arguing that their work has complicated Jameson’s assumptions.

Download or read book Gender in African Women s Writing written by Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1997-12-22 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is a cogent analysis of the complexities of gender in the work of nine contemporary Anglophone and Francophone novelists. . . . offers illuminating interpretations of worthy writers . . . " —Multicultural Review "This book reaffirms Bessie Head's remark that books are a tool, in this case a tool that allows readers to understand better the rich lives and the condition of African women. Excellent notes and a rich bibliography." —Choice ". . . a college-level analysis which will appeal to any interested in African studies and literature." —The Bookwatch This book applies gender as a category of analysis to the works of nine sub-Saharan women writers: Aidoo, Bá, Beyala, Dangarembga, Emecheta, Head, Liking, Tlali, and Zanga Tsogo. The author appropriates western feminist theories of gender in an African literary context, and in the process, she finds and names critical theory that is African, indigenous, self-determining, which she then melds with western feminist theory and comes out with an over-arching theory that enriches western, post-colonial and African critical perspectives.

Download or read book Liberation Literature and Liberation Feminism for Africa written by Ikechukwu Aloysius Orjinta and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 34 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Research Paper (postgraduate) from the year 2013 in the subject Literature - Africa, grade: keine, University of Nigeria (Humanities), course: Humanities and Post Colonial Studies, language: English, abstract: Modern African francophone and Anglophone Literatures date back to the era of the negritude movement. The pioneer African writer was confronted by the ugly past experiences of the inhumanity of the Trans-Atlantic and Trans-Saharan Slave Trade coupled with the degradation of the colonial period. As a result, he decided to pitch his camp with his suffering people by prefering to portray this evil in his writings, creating awareness on ways forward and calling for reforms. His tool was the sociological method. He laid less emphasis on the German werkimmanenz, the French l’art pour l’art, the Russian Formalism and the North American close-reading. The African feminist writer also turned her back to the Euro-American version of feminism and preferred the home-made ideology termed Womanism and her sister acronyms such as Stiwanism and Motherism which maintain that men and women relationship and apportioning of roles in the society should be complementary and not rivalry-prone or confrontational, while condemning obnoxious cultural and anti-womanist practices. Hence African men and women should concert efforts in liberating the African continent which is still suffering from modern versions of Slavery and Colonialism.This research will apply a multi-disciplinary approach and invoke the womanist, psychoanalytical and existentialist theoretical frameworks inter alia to appraise the relevant works of Chinua Achebe, Aminata Sow Fall and Ahmadou Kourouma inter alia. Through their realist portrayals, these African writers have created awareness of the injustices perpetrated by African oppressors, both Euro-Americans and their African collaborators. This research is a call on African writers for more prophetic and liberating efforts in their creatic works and aesthetics. Liberation Literature should by so doing ursher in a GREAT REFUSAL of the status quo and a way forward towards the birth of the beautiful ones in Africa who will fashion out a home-made literary, political, economic and social transformation for the betterment of not only women, but also men as well as youths of Africa.

Download or read book And Wrote My Story Anyway written by Barbara Boswell and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critically examines influential novels in English by eminent black female writers Studying these writers' key engagements with nationalism, race and gender during apartheid and the transition to democracy, Barbara Boswell traces the ways in which black women's fiction criticality interrogates narrow ideas of nationalism. She examines who is included and excluded, while producing alternative visions for a more just South African society. This is an erudite analysis of ten well-known South African writers, spanning the apartheid and post-apartheid era: Miriam Tlali, Lauretta Ngcobo, Farida Karodia, Agnes Sam, Sindiwe Magona, Zoë Wicomb, Rayda Jacobs, Yvette Christiansë, Kagiso Lesego Molope, and Zukiswa Wanner. Boswell argues that black women's fiction could and should be read as a subversive site of knowledge production in a setting, which, for centuries, denied black women's voices and intellects. Reading their fiction as theory, for the first time these writers' works are placed in sustained conversation with each other, producing an arc of feminist criticism that speaks forcefully back to the abuse of a racist, white-dominated, patriarchal power.

Download or read book African Women Narrating Identity written by Rose A. Sackeyfio and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-08-08 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the complexities of women’s lives in Africa and the transnational spaces of Europe and North America through the literary works of key African women writers. Using a postcolonial analytical framework, the book highlights the commonalities of African women’s identities and experiences across national, ethnic, linguistic, and religious boundaries in Africa and in western settings. It collates the multi-regional narratives of key African women writers who convey how women’s lives are shaped by social, economic, and political factors at home and abroad. It also illustrates the intersection of ethnicity, class, and gender that flows through all the texts examined. Unlike existing works that explore African women’s fiction, this book uncovers the transformation from postcolonial themes of nationhood to global modalities of post-independence writing through the lens of gender. The book engages with feminist expression through broad themes including religion, war and ethnic conflict, women’s status in society, tradition and modernity and local and global tensions. A unique approach to literary criticism of Anglophone African women’s writing, this book will be of interest to scholars and students in the field of African Literature, African Studies, Women’s Literature, Postcolonial Literature, Cultural and Ethnic Studies and Migration and Diaspora Studies.

Download or read book African Pasts Presents and Futures written by Touria Khannous and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2013-10-17 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African Pasts, Presents, and Futures: Generational Shifts in African Women's Literature, Film, and Internet Discourse, by Touria Khannous, provides a history of African women’s cultural production, as well as an alternative approach to the arguments that have traditionally dominated post-colonial studies in general, and African and gender studies in particular. It examines some of the more overarching questions that are prevalent in the works of African women authors, who position themselves within the contexts of Islam, feminism, nationalism, modernity, and global and postcolonial politics, thus engaging in the construction of socio-political platforms for reform in their home countries. The book explores different aspects of women’s agency at the political, cultural, social, religious and aesthetic level, and highlights their civil society activism and push for legal reform. It also traces their opinions on a range of social and political questions and underscores fundamental shifts in their positions and concerns through the different generations.

Download or read book Less Than One and Double written by Kenneth W. Harrow and published by Greenwood. This book was released on 2002 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scorning those who feel obliged to apologize for applying western feminism to African literature on the basis that it perpetuates cultural imperialism, Harrow (English, Michigan State U.) uses a branch of thought that is associated with French feminists and is situated within the sphere of psychoanalytical criticism to lend insight into works of the first wave of African feminist writers such as Ama Ata Aidoo and Safi Faye, and the second wave represented by Tsitsi Dangarembga, Calixthe Beyala, Veronique Tadjo, Tanella Boni, and others. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Download or read book New Women s Writing in African Literature written by Ernest Emenyo̲nu and published by Africa Research and Publications. This book was released on 2004 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African women writers have come a long way from the 1960s when they were hardly noticed as serious writers. Since the 1960s, female writing in Africa has been steadily rising in quantity and quality. This work shows how their literature is redefining images of womanhood.

Download or read book African Women s Literature Orature and Intertextuality written by Susan Arndt and published by Humboldt University of Berlin. This book was released on 1998 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Feminism and Black Women s Creative Writing written by Aduke Adebayo and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Female Subjectivities in African Literature written by Smith, Charles and published by Handel Books. This book was released on 2015-09-23 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In literature the ambiguous portraiture of female characters by some male writers and the phallic nature of men's writings have proved a matter of concern to female writers in Africa. For decades within African writing the issue of silencing was interrogated particularly as it addressed the muting and marginalisation of black women by male writers through the script of patriarchy which men follow. In this series we continue the literary and dramatic tradition of feminist concern for women's issues and we review novels, plays and poetry which demonstrate a commitment to exploring the challenges facing modern women in changing times and excerpting the issues of gender, feminism, identity, race, history, national and international politics specifically as they affect women. Female Subjectivities collectively answers the need to question and adumbrate the possibilities of literary revisions, showing what it would mean to revise even the Feminist psychoanalyst in a discourse on the subjectivity of women of colour.

Download or read book African Women Writing Diaspora written by Rose A. Sackeyfio and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-04-26 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African Women Writing Diaspora: Transnational Perspectives in the Twenty-First Century examines contemporary fiction by African women authors to resonate diaspora perspectives on what it means to be African within transnational spaces. Through a critical lens, the collection interrogates the ways in which women construct new ways of telling the African story in the global age of social, economic, and political transformation. African Women Writing Diaspora illustrates that for African women, life in the diaspora is an uncharted journey across new landscapes of identity beyond Africa’s borders as a unifying theme. The fictional works analyzed represent the leading women writers who dominate the African literary canon, and the contributors explore diverse themes of immigrant life, racialized identities, and otherness within transnational spaces of the west.

Download or read book Black Women Writing and Identity written by Carole Boyce-Davies and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-09-11 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black Women Writing and Identity is an exciting work by one of the most imaginative and acute writers around. The book explores a complex and fascinating set of interrelated issues, establishing the significance of such wide-ranging subjects as: * re-mapping, re-naming and cultural crossings * tourist ideologies and playful world travelling * gender, heritage and identity * African women's writing and resistance to domination * marginality, effacement and decentering * gender, language and the politics of location Carole Boyce-Davies is at the forefront of attempts to broaden the discourse surrounding the representation of and by black women and women of colour. Black Women Writing and Identity represents an extraordinary achievement in this field, taking our understanding of identity, location and representation to new levels.

Download or read book Writing African Women written by Stephanie Newell and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-06-15 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does our understanding of Africa shift when we begin from the perspective of women? What can the African perspective offer theories of culture and of gender difference? This work, as unique and insightful today as when it was first published, brings together a wide variety of African academics and other researchers to explore the links between literature, popular culture and theories of gender. Beginning with a ground-breaking overview of African gender theory, the book goes on to analyse women's writing, uncovering the ways different writers have approached issues of female creativity and colonial history, as well as the ways in which they have subverted popular stereotypes around African women. The contributors also explore the related gender dynamics of mask performance and oral story-telling. This major analysis of gender in popular and postcolonial cultural production remains essential reading for students and academics in women's studies, cultural studies and literature.

Download or read book Gender in Selected African Novels written by Ikechukwu Aloysius Orjinta and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2011-08 with total page 25 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scientific Essay from the year 2011 in the subject Literature - Africa, Philosophisch-Theologische Hochschule Brixen (none), course: Gender Studies, language: English, abstract: In its oral and written forms, literature has constantly served as one of the major instruments in mirroring reality and society. Literature remains a consistent tool in the representation, comprehension and interpretation of fields of human endeavour such as religion, class struggle, politics, human situations, social conflicts and Gender relations. No wonder then, gender relations, especially feminism has laid hold on literature as a veritable machinery for gender activism Men discovered the gold mine in literature quite early and for ages tapped its resources to carve a niche for the male gender in politics, culture and religion. At the same time the male gender used the resources of literature and criticism to invent prejudices, stereotypes and superstitious beliefs and heaped them on the female gender. While women laboured under this burden for ages, men were busy upstaging them in every field of life. Few instances have however existed where certain female figures due to their exalted royal, military, economics and cultic backgrounds have through individual efforts raised their heads above water in their respective societies and eras. Literature has equally recorded cases where powerful women in various races have astutely and subtly cornered for themselves rights and priviledges which ordinary women and even ordinary men could never dream of. Such positions were like personal identity cards which neither outlived them nor were enjoyed by other women during and after their lifetime. These examples are today literature, in history and literary achieves. [...]