Download or read book Marriage in Maradi written by Barbara MacGowan Cooper and published by Heinemann Educational Publishers. This book was released on 1997 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women's contradictory contributions to social and economic change in the twentieth century can be seen in their improvisations upon the seemingly fixed "traditions" surrounding marriage in Maradi. Cooper finds that women in Maradi have simultaneously advanced their individual interests and undermined protections to women as a whole by redefining the role of "wife" in agriculture, by adopting seclusion in order to find leisure time for trade, by emphasizing hierarchy among wives, unmarried women, and girls, and by transforming the material component in marriage exchange. With the growth of international trade, state employment, and Islamic norms, competing ideals for marriage and the role of women have emerged. The French colonial administration, the independent government of Niger, and individual men have all attempted to redefine local practices in an effort to control women. Both men and women in the region are manipulating, negotiating, and reinterpreting marriage, wedding exchange, and nonmarriage in response to options created by a shifting political economy.
Download or read book States of Marriage written by Emily S. Burrill and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-30 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: States of Marriage shows how throughout the colonial period in French Sudan (present-day Mali) the institution of marriage played a central role in how the empire defined its colonial subjects as gendered persons with certain attendant rights and privileges. The book is a modern history of the ideological debates surrounding the meaning of marriage, as well as the associated legal and sociopolitical practices in colonial and postcolonial Mali. It is also the first to use declassified court records regarding colonialist attempts to classify and categorize traditional marriage conventions in the southern region of the country. In French Sudan, as elsewhere in colonial Africa, the first stage of marriage reform consisted of efforts to codify African marriages, bridewealth transfers, and divorce proceedings in public records, rendering these social arrangements “legible” to the colonial administration. Once this essential legibility was achieved, other, more forceful interventions to control and reframe marriage became possible. This second stage of marriage reform can be traced through transformations in and by the colonial court system, African engagements with state-making processes, and formations of “gender justice.” The latter refers to gender-based notions of justice and legal rights, typically as defined by governing and administrative bodies as well as by socioxadpolitical communities. Gender justice went through a period of favoring the rights of women, to a period of favoring patriarchs, to a period of emphasizing the power of the individual—but all within the context of a paternalistic and restrictive colonial state.
Download or read book Militarizing Marriage written by Sarah J. Zimmerman and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-24 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following tirailleurs sénégalais’ deployments in West Africa, Congo, Madagascar, North Africa, Syria-Lebanon, Vietnam, and Algeria from the 1880s to 1962, Militarizing Marriage historicizes how African servicemen advanced conjugal strategies with women at home and abroad. Sarah J. Zimmerman examines the evolution of women’s conjugal relationships with West African colonial soldiers to show how the sexuality, gender, and exploitation of women were fundamental to the violent colonial expansion and the everyday operation of colonial rule in modern French Empire. These conjugal behaviors became military marital traditions that normalized the intimate manifestation of colonial power in social reproduction across the empire. Soldiers’ cross-colonial and interracial households formed at the intersection of race and sexuality outside the colonizer/colonized binary. Militarizing Marriage uses contemporary feminist scholarship on militarism and violence to portray how the subjugation of women was indispensable to military conquest and colonial rule.
Download or read book Hadija s Story written by Harmony O'Rourke and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-13 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1952, a woman named Hadija was brought to trial in an Islamic courtroom in the Cameroon Grassfields on a charge of bigamy. Quickly, however, the court proceedings turned to the question of whether she had been the wife or the slave-concubine of her deceased husband. In tandem with other court cases of the day, Harmony O'Rourke illuminates a set of contestations in which marriage, slavery, morality, memory, inheritance, status, and identity were at stake for Muslim Hausa migrants, especially women. As she tells Hadija's story, O'Rourke disrupts dominant patriarchal and colonial narratives that have emphasized male activities and projects to assert cultural distinctiveness, and she brings forward a new set of women's issues involving concerns for personal prosperity, the continuation of generations, and Islamic religious expectations in communities separated by long distances.
Download or read book Marriage Law and Modernity written by Julia Moses and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-11-16 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marriage, Law and Modernity offers a global perspective on the modern history of marriage. Widespread recent debate has focused on the changing nature of families, characterized by both the rise of unmarried cohabitation and the legalization of same-sex marriage. However, historical understanding of these developments remains limited. How has marriage come to be the target of national legislation? Are recent policies on same-sex marriage part of a broader transformation? And, has marriage come to be similar across the globe despite claims about national, cultural and religious difference? This collection brings together scholars from across the world in order to offer a global perspective on the history of marriage. It unites legal, political and social history, and seeks to draw out commonalities and differences by exploring connections through empire, international law and international migration.
Download or read book Rethinking Marriage in Francophone African and Carribean Literatures written by Cécile Accilien and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rethinking Marriage in Francophone African and Caribbean Literatures analyzes novels and films that demonstrate how marriage affects Francophone African and Caribbean women in their respective societies. It argues that marriage serves as a catalyst for intense identity formation because it functions as a narrative intersection for a number of overlapping themes on gender and the body, class and economics, religion, interracial and intercultural identity and nation building. Marriage provides a narrative space for commentary on cultural practices presented in the works in question as the foundations of cultural identity.
Download or read book Rethinking Marriage in Francophone African and Caribbean Literatures written by Cecile Accilien and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2008-02-08 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rethinking Marriage in Francophone African and Caribbean Literatures analyzes novels and films that demonstrate how marriage affects Francophone African and Caribbean women in their respective societies. It argues that marriage serves as a catalyst for intense identity formation because it functions as a narrative intersection for a number of overlapping themes on gender and the body, class and economics, religion, interracial and intercultural identity and nation building. Marriage provides a narrative space for commentary on cultural practices presented in the works in question as the foundations of cultural identity.
Download or read book Countless Blessings written by Barbara M. Cooper and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of pregnancy and childbirth customs in Niger, and how it has both a high fertility rate and high rates of maternal and infant mortality. How do women in Niger experience pregnancy and childbirth differently from women in the United States or Europe? Barbara M. Cooper sets out to understand childbirth in a country with the world’s highest fertility rate and an alarmingly high rate of maternal and infant mortality. Cooper shows how the environment, slavery and abolition, French military rule, and the rapid expansion of Islam have all influenced childbirth and fertility in Niger from the nineteenth century to the present day. She sketches a landscape where fear of infertility generates intense competition between communities, ethnicities, and co-wives and creates a culture where concerns about infertility dominate concerns about overpopulation, where illegitimate children are rejected, and where the education of girls is sacrificed in the name of avoiding shame. Given a medical system poorly adapted to women’s needs, a precarious economy, and a political context where it is impossible to address sexuality openly, Cooper discovers that it is little wonder that pregnancy and birth are a woman’s greatest pride as well as a source of grave danger. “Beautifully written, insightful, and full of empathy. A must read for anyone seeking to understand the damaging consequences of neglecting women’s and infants’ health.” —Johanna Schoen, author of Abortion after Roe “Few experiences are more potent than reproduction. Countless Blessings brilliantly unwinds the full import of this potency, tracing a history of demography, bodily peril, parental joy, and social, religious, and political meaning. Cooper’s tremendous skill and creativity as a scholar enable us to see the political stakes of reproduction, even as they are grounded in the intimacies of embodied experience.” —Julie Livingston, author of Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa “Countless Blessings shows how women in Niger and in West Africa have long navigated the various states of social value, personhood, spirituality, and childbirth, and it paints a remarkable picture of how contested and embodied the social and material concerns of childbirth remain for women today.” —Ampson Hagan, Univeristy of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, IJAHS
Download or read book Farmers and the State in Colonial Kano written by Steven Pierce and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2005-10-26 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Farmers and the State in Colonial Kano, Steven Pierce examines issues surrounding the colonial state and the distribution of state power in northern Nigeria. Here, Pierce deconstructs the colonial state and offers a unique reading of land tenure that challenges earlier views of the role of indirect rule. According to Pierce, land tenure was the means the colonial government used to rule the local population and extract taxes from them, but it was also a political logic with a fundamental flaw and a Western bias. In Pierce's view, colonial representations of land tenure claimed to reflect precolonial systems of rule, but instead, fundamentally misrepresented farmers' experience. He maintains that this misrepresentation created a paradox at the core of the colonial state which persists into the present and helps to explain contemporary problems in African states. In this sweeping and eloquent account of African history, readers will find an extended genealogy of land law and taxation as well as rich material on the power of indigenous knowledge and the persistence of colonial systems of rule.
Download or read book Landless Women Hopeless Women written by Martha Diarra and published by IIED. This book was released on 2006 with total page 58 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper is a summary of a regional case study on gender, land and decentralisation. The main study has two parts: three portraits of women showing different examples of access to natural resources and local leadership; and a general report based on the portraits and on interviews carried out in seven study sites in Maradi and Zinder regions in Niger.
Download or read book Holding the World Together written by Nwando Achebe and published by University of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2019-04-16 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring contributions from some of the most accomplished scholars on the topic, Holding the World Together explores the rich and varied ways in which women have wielded power across the African continent, from the precolonial period to the present. Suitable for classroom use, this comprehensive volume considers such topics as the representation of African women, their role in national liberation movements, their experiences of religious fundamentalism (both Christian and Muslim), their incorporation into the world economy, changing family and marriage systems, impacts of the world economy on their lives and livelihoods, and the unique challenges they face in the areas of health and disease. Contributors: Nwando Achebe, Ousseina Alidou, Signe Arnfred, Andrea L. Arrington-Sirois, Henryatta Ballah, Teresa Barnes, Josephine Beoku-Betts, Emily Burril, Abena P. A. Busia, Gracia Clark, Alicia Decker, Karen Flint, December Green, Cajetan Iheka, Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Elizabeth M. Perego, Claire Robertson, Kathleen Sheldon, Aili Mari Tripp, Cassandra Veney
Download or read book Meanings of Marriage in a Market Town written by Emily Susan Burrill and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Evangelical Christians in the Muslim Sahel written by Barbara M. Cooper and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2006-07-10 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “fascinating historical account” of a Christian mission in Niger offers a personal and richly detailed look at religious institutions in the region (Religious Studies Review). Barbara M. Cooper looks closely at the Sudan Interior Mission, an evangelical Christian mission that has taken a tenuous hold in a predominantly Hausa Muslim area on the southern fringe of Niger. Based on sustained fieldwork, personal interviews, and archival research, this vibrant, sensitive, compelling, and candid book gives a unique glimpse into an important dimension of religious life in Africa. Cooper’s involvement in a violent religious riot provides a useful backdrop for introducing other themes and concerns such as Bible translation, medical outreach, public preaching, tensions between English-speaking and French-speaking missionaries, and the Christian mission’s changing views of Islam.
Download or read book Surviving with Dignity written by Scott M. Youngstedt and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012-11-29 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surviving with Dignity explores three key interconnected themes—structural violence, suffering, and surviving with dignity—through examining the lived experiences of first and second-generation migrant Hausa men in Niamey over the past two decadesin the current neoliberal moment. Colonialism, state mismanagement, structural adjustment, and global neoliberalism have inflicted structural violence on Nigeriens by denying them human and particularly socioeconomic rights and relegating them to a status at—or very near—the bottom of UN Human Development Index in each year of the past decade. As a result of structural violence, most Hausa of Niamey suffer grinding and intractable poverty that has intensified over the past two decades. Suffering is a recurrent and expected condition; it is the normal condition.The central goal of the book is to explain the material (migration and informal economy work) and symbolic (meaning-making) strategies that Hausa individuals and communities have deployed in their struggles not only to literally survive in the face of economic austerity on the outer periphery of the global economy, but also to survive with dignity. Despite daunting challenges, many Hausa men find strength and patience in their humble devotion to Islam, cherish their vibrant sociability and gracious hospitality, deeply value extraordinary conversational virtuosity and knowledge, deploy humor in complex transcendent, defensive and self-critical ways, perpetuate a sense of hope and optimism for the future, articulate their own modernities, and strive relentlessly to feel connected to the modern world at large. Extreme poverty created by socioeconomic injustice constitutes an unacceptable assault on human dignity. Hausa men’s remarkable strength does not negate the reality of the socioeconomic injustices they face. Their dire poverty in a world of plenty is unacceptable even when they handle it gracefully.
Download or read book Une Ville Libre Marriage Divorce and Sexuality in Colonial Libreville Gabon 1849 1960 written by Rachel Jean-Baptiste and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 632 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Convening Black Intimacy written by Natasha Erlank and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-08 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unprecedented study of how Christianity reshaped Black South Africans’ ideas about gender, sexuality, marriage, and family during the first half of the twentieth century. This book demonstrates that the primary affective force in the construction of modern Black intimate life in early twentieth-century South Africa was not the commonly cited influx of migrant workers but rather the spread of Christianity. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, African converts developed a new conception of intimate life, one that shaped ideas about sexuality, gender roles, and morality. Although the reshaping of Black intimacy occurred first among educated Africans who aspired to middle-class status, by the 1950s it included all Black Christians—60 percent of the Black South African population. In turn, certain Black traditions and customs were central to the acceptance of sexual modernity, which gained traction because it included practices such as lobola, in which a bridegroom demonstrates his gratitude by transferring property to his bride’s family. While the ways of understanding intimacy that Christianity informed enjoyed broad appeal because they partially aligned with traditional ways, other individuals were drawn to how the new ideas broke with tradition. In either case, Natasha Erlank argues that what Black South Africans regard today as tradition has been unequivocally altered by Christianity. In asserting the paramount influence of Christianity on unfolding ideas about family, gender, and marriage in Black South Africa, Erlank challenges social historians who have attributed the key factor to be the migrant labor system. Erlank draws from a wide range of sources, including popular Black literature and the Black press, African church and mission archives, and records of the South African law courts, which she argues have been underutilized in histories of South Africa. The book is sure to attract historians and other scholars interested in the history of African Christianity, African families, sexuality, and the social history of law, especially colonial law.
Download or read book Mother Is Gold Father Is Glass written by Lorelle D. Semley and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2010-11-29 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lorelle D. Semley explores the historical and political meanings of motherhood in West Africa and beyond, showing that the roles of women were far more complicated than previously thought. While in Kétu, Bénin, Semley discovered that women were treasurers, advisors, ritual specialists, and colonial agents in addition to their more familiar roles as queens, wives, and sisters. These women with special influence made it difficult for the French and others to enforce an ideal of subordinate women. As she traces how women gained prominence, Semley makes clear why powerful mother figures still exist in the symbols and rituals of everyday practices.
