Gender Issues in African Literature
Gender Issues in African Literature

Author: Chin Ce

Publisher: African Books Collective

Published: 2014-04-02

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 9783603752

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Gender Issues in African Literature examines the ways in which some protagonists of African fictions are made to counter and challenge intertwined Western discourses on gender, employment, sexuality, and health. Here the conflict between Tradition and Modernity is argues from the favourite premise of male supremacist ideology showing how women have unlearned these false concepts to build a sustained feminist movement and (re)learn the value of sisterhood. There is a bold attempt to reread Achebe as a consistent in urging women to fight the seemingly oppressive structures that have traditionally discriminated against them, and to disregard their diversity and embrace their unity. A chapter of Feminist Re-writing disagrees with the attempt to equate theory with political activism and presents Feminist literature as more than a verbal assertion that points to Feminist aesthetics and politics. The use of the trauma theory and testimonio literature to explore traumatisation of female characters and its impact for Zimbabwean civil society is a useful addition to these gender studies in African literature.

Ethics and Human Rights in Anglophone African Women’s Literature
Ethics and Human Rights in Anglophone African Women’s Literature

Author: Chielozona Eze

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-12-14

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 3319409220

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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, contemporaryAfrican 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.

The Concubine
The Concubine

Author: Elechi Amadi

Publisher: Heinemann

Published: 1966

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780435905569

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Set in a remote village in Eastern Nigeria, an area yet to be affected by European values and where society is orderly and predictable, the story concerns a woman "of great beauty and dignity" who inadvertently brings suffering and death to all her lovers. The novel portrays a society still ruled by traditional gods, offering a glimpse into the human relationships that such a society creates.

Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender
Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender

Author: Florence Stratton

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-09-23

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 1000158772

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The influence of colonialism and race on the development of African literature has been the subject of a number of studies. The effect of patriarchy and gender, however, and indeed the contributions of African women, have up until now been largely ignored by the critics. Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender is the first extensive account of African literature from a feminist perspective. In this first radical and exciting work Florence Stratton outlines the features of an emerging female tradition in African fiction. A chapter is dedicated to each to the works of four women writers: Grace Ogot, Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta and Mariama Ba. In addition she provides challenging new readings of canonical male authors such as Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiongo'o and Wole Soyinka. Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender thus provides the first truly comprehensive definition of the current literary tradition in Africa.

African Literature
African Literature

Author: Safoura Salami-Boukari

Publisher: African Books Collective

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0979085853

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How do we resolve the insider/outsider interpreting conundrum? Why do readers from different parts of the world read, interpret, or understand foreign literatures the way they do? What drives peculiar critical reactions, canon formations and such issues which determine the survival of cultural productions or their continued adoption as useful bolsters for a people's self-definition or indeed self-preservation and self-determination? African Literature: Gender Discourse, Religious Values, and the African Worldview offers a series of fresh insights into most of the old "problematics" which used to sustain the interpretations of African literature, especially by women. Students, scholars, and general readers wishing to consider issues of gender in relation to African cultural and socioeconomic systems and what Salami-Boukari interrogates and names as an "African worldview," will find the interdisciplinary discussion of historical analyses, literary criticism and gender discourses a useful method for engaging contemporary African perspectives.

African Women Writers and the Politics of Gender
African Women Writers and the Politics of Gender

Author: Sadia Zulfiqar

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2016-09-23

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 1443812773

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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.

Negotiating Patriarchy and Gender in Africa
Negotiating Patriarchy and Gender in Africa

Author: Egodi Uchendu

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-08-26

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 1793642052

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A 2022 Choice Reviews Outstanding Academic Title Negotiating Patriarchy and Gender in Africa: Discourses, Practices, and Policies examines the entrenchment of patriarchy in Africa and its attendant socioeconomic and political consequences on gender relations. The contributors analyze the historical and modern ways in which gender expectations have enabled women in African societies to be systematically abused and marginalized, from unpaid labor to poor representation in decision-making areas. Exploring regions such as rural Uganda, the suburbs of Zimbabwe, the Gold Coast, South Africa, and Nigeria, contributors incorporate a wide range of academic theories and disciplines to establish the need for improved policy implementation on gender issues at both the local and national government levels in Africa.

Readings in Gender in Africa
Readings in Gender in Africa

Author: Andrea Cornwall

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2005-02-14

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 9780253217400

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Readings in Gender in Africa collects the most important critical and theoretical writings on how gender issues have transformed contemporary views of Africa. Scholarship from North America, Europe, and Africa is represented in this comprehensive volume. A synthetic introduction by Andrea Cornwall discusses efforts to include women in research about Africa. The volume not only shows how gender relations have been constructed on the African continent but reflects the changes in approach and inquiry that have been brought about as scholars consider gender identities and difference in their work. Specific themes covered here include the contestation and representation of gender, femininity and masculinity, livelihoods and lifeways, gender and religion, gender and culture, and gender and governance. Readers from across the landscape of African studies will find this an essential sourcebook. Published in association with the International African Institute, London

Women, Gender, and Sexualities in Africa
Women, Gender, and Sexualities in Africa

Author: Toyin Falola

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781611631531

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This book is a collection of significant analytical and critical writings on how the structures of power have exerted systematic governance over women. Women, Gender, and Sexualities in Africa also addresses how the rhetorical devices of tradition and modernity have played important roles in the control and appropriation of African women's bodies. The chapters draw on history, literature, political science, journalism, sociology, comparative studies, and women and gender studies to offer multidisciplinary perspectives from which to understand the diversity of women's experiences, gender issues, and sexualities as they intersect with class, race, ethnicity, and nationality. This volume not only shows how the macro-narratives of colonialism and post-colonialism provide frameworks for understanding the micro-narratives of empowerment and disempowerment of women, but also considers resistance strategies women have used to guard against the subjugation of their bodies and sexualities. Themes covered include constructions of African motherhood and womanhood, femininity and health, gender and sexual representations and contestations, and gendered nationalism and culture. Women, Gender, and Sexualities in Africa is not only an important sourcebook, but it also speaks to a broad spectrum of readers from a multidisciplinary perspective. This book is part of the African World Series, edited by Toyin Falola, Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, University of Texas at Austin. "This will be a welcome addition in any library, as the essays can be used in a broad range of courses (such as gender studies, history, anthropology, literature, art, public health, even political science and development studies) ... Highly recommended." -- CHOICE Magazine "Overall, the book brings together a very good selection of academic articles that, starting from the introduction, carefully and in detail analyze the topic of sexuality in its various aspects, without avoiding uncomfortable subjects at all, and with sound referencing and support materials, each of them with clarifying notes and the appropriate, up-to-date bibliography on the issue, so that readers who want to increase their knowledge of specific points can do so."--Mar Rodríguez Vázquez, Cuttington University, African Studies Quarterly

Africa Writes Back to Self
Africa Writes Back to Self

Author: Evan M. Mwangi

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2010-07-02

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 1438426976

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The profound effects of colonialism and its legacies on African cultures have led postcolonial scholars of recent African literature to characterize contemporary African novels as, first and foremost, responses to colonial domination by the West. In Africa Writes Back to Self, Evan Maina Mwangi argues instead that the novels are primarily engaged in conversation with each other, particularly over emergent gender issues such as the representation of homosexuality and the disenfranchisement of women by male-dominated governments. He covers the work of canonical novelists Nadine Gordimer, Chinua Achebe, NguÅgiÅ wa Thiong'o, and J. M. Coetzee, as well as popular writers such as Grace Ogot, David Maillu, Promise Okekwe, and Rebeka Njau. Mwangi examines the novels' self-reflexive fictional strategies and their potential to refigure the dynamics of gender and sexuality in Africa and demote the West as the reference point for cultures of the Global South.