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The article presents an interview with Mame Coumba Ndiaye, daughter of the African poet Mariama Diop nee Ba, who wrote biography of her mother. Topics discussed include mother-daughter epistolary relationship, role of print culture in their family, and relevance of her mother's literary work in today's era. Further mentioned are topics including details of her biographical novel and whether the novel is fiction or nonfiction.

In this article, the author discusses various literary works of African poet Mariama Diop nee Ba, presented at the L'Ouest Africain forum. It explores the theme of her poem "Festac . . . Souvenirs de Lagos" ("Festac . . . Memories of Lagos,)" epistolary genres, and an essay on negritude. Also mentioned are topics including the challenges that campaigns for gender equality faced in fifteen years post Senegalese independence and gender inequality in print media.

The article focuses on the poem "Festac . . . Souvenirs de Lagos" ("Festac . . . Memories of Lagos," by Mariama Diop nee Ba in order to valorize Black and African creative expression and intellectual thought. Topics discussed included the Topics discussed include the effect of the poem on the (Second Festival of Black Arts and Culture) FESTAC's event, the marginalization of African women in Pan-Africanism, and discourse of anticolonial struggle for final emancipation and self-determination.

The article offers poetry criticism of the poem "Festac . . . Souvenirs de Lagos" ("Festac . . . Memories of Lagos," by Mariama Diop nee Ba. Topics discussed include (Second Festival of Black Arts and Culture) FESTAC's project that aims to valorize Black and African creative expression and intellectual thought, the marginalization of African women in Pan-Africanism, and discourse of anticolonial struggle in the neocolonial context of the 1970s for final emancipation and self-determination.

The article focuses on African women who have been marginalized in the performance, planning, and documentation of Pan-Africanist projects, following the series of Pan-African Congresses held from 1919 onward. Topics discussed include by the republication of the poem "Festac . . . Souvenirs de Lagos," ("Festac . . . Memories of Lagos") by Mariama Diop nee Ba at the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) and the historical relevance of the poem with festival.

The article focuses on the poem "Festac . . . Souvenirs de Lagos" ("Festac . . . Memories of Lagos," by Mariama Diop nee Ba in order to valorize Black and African creative expression and intellectual thought on account of the Second Festival of Black Arts and Culture) FESTAC event. Topics discussed include effect of the poem on people attending FESTAC, marginalization of African women in Pan-Africanism, and discourse of anticolonial struggle for final emancipation and self-determination.

In this article, the author discusses the online representation of the African women in Pan-Africanism in the poem "Festac . . . Souvenirs de Lagos" ("Festac . . . Memories of Lagos," by Mariama Diop nee Ba on social media platforms such as Instagram. It explains a term mediated ancestrality as a connection of younger generation with ancestors (poets) whose works being adapted to a digital communication technology such as twentieth century African literature, extending it into digital platform.

The article focuses on two poems including "Festac . . . Souvenirs de Lagos" ("Festac . . . Memories of Lagos," by Mariama Diop nee Ba and another by Younousse Seye, which aimed at African women in Pan-Africanism.It mentions that these poems were circulated at the Second Festival of Black Arts and Culture) FESTAC event in 1977 and Pan-African Festival of Algiers (PANAF) in 1969. Topics discussed include creative expression and intellectual thought of neocolonial African women.

The article focuses on the poem "Festac . . . Souvenirs de Lagos" ("Festac . . . Memories of Lagos," by Mariama Diop nee Ba in order to valorize Black and African creative expression and intellectual thought on account of (Second Festival of Black Arts and Culture) FESTAC event. It discusses an era of Nigeria's geopolitical ascendance in the wake of a 1973 oil embargo, in reference with the Lagos of 1977. It focuses on Nigeria's deviation on shaping the global notions of black culture.

This research investigates the profound influence of Eurocentric beauty ideals, propagated predominantly through mainstream media, on the self-perception and body image of Moroccan women. Focusing on a sample of 134 females, the study examines how exposure to these ideals through media outlets, such as television, and social media impacts beauty and self-perception. The findings highlight several critical dynamics. Firstly, there is a significant negative correlation between high exposure and both self-esteem and body image, indicating that greater consumption of Western media is associated with lower self-esteem and more negative body image perceptions. Secondly, our research reveals that Moroccan women experience substantial pressure from social media as well as their inner circle to conform to certain beauty standards, which adversely affects their psychological health and perception of beauty. Finally, the study identifies age and education as significant moderators in how media exposure affects women, suggesting that these factors may offer some resilience against the negative impact of media. These insights underscore the need for a broader representation in media to foster healthier self-perceptions and challenge the dominance of Eurocentric beauty standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grafting selected elements into a primary theory from another theoretical approach can sometimes enhance the theoretical framework to facilitate more refined data analysis. Because of the possible risks of theoretical fragmentation that may result from incorporating elements of different theories into a single framework, we opted for grafting selected elements of one theory into our primary theory, to carefully retain the logical coherence of the main theory. In this paper, we draw on a study of isiXhosa-speaking women traders in Cape Town's Langa Township (hereafter referred as Langa) to argue that grafting elements of Sen's capability approach (CA) into Giddens's structuration theory (ST) enhanced our theoretical framework. This improved the quality of our analysis and enabled us to generate more nuanced findings. Our qualitative study with 25 African women traders investigated how these women exercised agency in responding to structural constraints and opportunities that affected their trading businesses. We used participant observation and in-depth interviews to collect data. Sen's CA (grounded in social justice) expanded on Giddens's notion of structures as constraining and enabling. For this aspect of our theoretical framework, CA informed by Sen's research on women's empowerment projects amplified the intersection of gender, class and race constraints that affected the women traders. Furthermore, CA's emphasis on quality of life and well-being outcomes was useful in helping us assess the transformative capacity of the women traders' agency. This dimension complemented Giddens's ST and therefore our theoretical framework was enhanced by grafting in these elements from Sen's CA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I bring five recent, substantial novels by Eastern African women writers together for the first time in a study regarding the texts as modern 'national epics', analysing some of their shared characteristics in foregrounding local participation in the making of East African ethnonational histories. I trace the novelists' implicit, open-eyed moral evaluation of their leaders and peoples, neither sentimentalising nor deriding the often terrible struggles of their peoples against both inside and outside powers that seek to keep them in subjugation. The texts eschew traditional heroic portrayal of single, male leaders in national epics and allow us to grasp diverse, communal contributions to the growth of nationhood, while giving larger, often central roles to women. The texts earn the epithet 'epic' by authoritatively demonstrating that their embodied, localised histories matter, testifying to the wide human spectrum of the peoples they portray; as novelistic acts they are impressive and moving bids for recognition. As post-colonial endeavours, the texts effectively decentre colonial interventions. While the chosen novels are shown to be relatable, their individual power of portrayal and aesthetic achievements are scrupulously differentiated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African feminist writers argue black female bodies should be understood as interactions between materiality and the symbolic constructions of the body embedded within a given culture. They caution that an overemphasis on corporeality and embodiment denies subjectivity to black women. Responding to such concerns, contemporary African cultural and creative practitioners offer alternatives to continuing objectification and bodily stereotyping. In this essay I am particularly interested in the alternative visions of black female bodies presented in African speculative and science fiction film – visions which, I argue, engage colonial histories and local traditions in order to imagine a future inclusive of empowered female protagonists. I explore how the fictional configurations and cyborg imaginations of African sci-fi deconstruct and subvert the fixity, corporeality, fragility and captivity of the black female body. Drawing on African feminism and feminist science fiction in particular, I attempt to construct a theoretical framework through which to approach the representation of female bodies in sci-fi film from Africa. In the work of filmmakers such as Cameroonian Jean-Pierre Bekolo (Les Saignantes, 2005 and Naked Reality, 2016), Ghanaian filmmaker Frances Bodomo (Afronauts, 2014), Kenyan director Wanuri Kahiu (Pumzi, 2009) and South African filmmakers Michael Matthew (Sweetheart, 2010) and Amy van Houten (Elf, 2015), we find female-centred fantastical narratives that recast African women as futuristic cyborgs. Reminiscent of Donna Haraway's cyborg feminism of the late twentieth century, these filmmakers adapt the genres of fantasy and sci-fi to speculate about alternative African pasts and futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African Literature has grown exponentially in the past 50 years, with key literary giants as pioneers establishing its literary field. Even in present research and scholarship, African writings have helped inform and articulate modes of literary and theoretical discourse. Even more so, early African women's works (Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta, Ama Ata Aidoo and Mariama Ba), were said to have laid the foundations for contemporary African women writers to continue 'speaking' boldly for Africa and its women. My article argues that the bold strides taken by early writers Buchi Emecheta and Mariama Ba through the epistolary form, were fundamental for contemporary third-generation African women's writing that continued this legacy of inscription. Sade Adeniran's Imagine This (2007), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus (2004) and Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani's I do not come to you by chance (2009) are selections of works whose literary topos employs the epistolary forms of letters, diary entries and emails as ways to articulate the nuances experienced in Africa. Drawing on the similar form of the epistle used by Emecheta and Ba, the results of the analysis of Adeniran, Adichie and Nwaubani's works will inform us of the ways in which pioneering writings by African women were trailblazing to the quest of African female inscription. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the role of the female contributors to the African literary canon. It discusses the Une si Longue Lettre, a semi-autobiographical epistolary novel originally written in French by the Senegalese writer Mariama Bâ. It mentions that African literatures talks about the about how women can be independent within middle-class Muslim communities, along with Eurocentrism in African context.

This article argues that unlike the previous generations of African writers, the new generation is dominated by African women writers whose narratives are interwoven around empowered and dynamic female characters. Apprehending these writers as major voices in the new trend of African literature and as spokespersons of their societies, it studies novels by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Akachi Adimora Ezeigbo as typical narratives of the last decades. Encompassing fictional characters, historical figures and political leaders, it assesses the validity of female writer's representation of strong female characters successfully struggling and upholding patriarchal roots in contemporary Africa. The analysis proves first that the narratives of female writers stem from a feminist consciousness and then that these narratives draw inspiration from historical and contemporary African realities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Myths on gender relations of the African past, invented and propagated by settlers, were imbibed and even disseminated by early Shona writers. Shona indigenous culture, men and patriarchy were always shown to subordinate women's interests to men's and to place women in the service of men. After independence, novelists such as Mutasa (in Nhume yaMambo and Misodzi, Dikita neRopa) attempt a reconstruction of the position and image of African women in pre-colonial Zimbabwe. Using the Africana Womanist literary theory, this article is an examination of the (re)presentation of pre-colonial women by the contemporary Shona writer with intent to ascertain its authenticity. It observes that, while the writer's image of women approximates life of the past, other images still pant to Eurocentric images of African women. Thus, the writer exudes ambivalent (re)presentations of women in his novels. The article urges writers on the African past to keep researching and come up with layers of information on how past life was like as well as the good that can be adopted and adapted for the good of today's life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The condition of African women in contemporary society has become a topical issue in the field of francophone African literature. Works of some African women writers such as Carmen Toudonou and Khady Kiota among others, have demonstrated critical perception on issues concerning the lives and conditions of women in the society. The aim of this study is therefore, to analyse the conditions of African women in Presqu'une vie by Carmen Toudonou and Mutilée by Khady Kiota respectively. Specifically, these authors focus on enlightenment campaign and criticism of condition and lives of African women who are threatened by some social vices such as force marriage and domestic violence. In view of the above, this study tends to answer these questions: in spite of excellent contributions and suggestions made in recent studies in the area, why is the condition of African women continually threatened and what are prospective solutions to remedy the situation? To effectively carry out this study, the researchers adopt African womanism theory that was proposed by Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi. Having observed that sensitization of women is pertinent; this study therefore, recommends that education of African women should be a priority because it is evident that the emancipation of women is possible through formal education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This article explores how women writers in Nigeria and Tanzania use digital media, drawing parallels between infrastructural enablement and literary worldmaking. It argues that female African writers offer insights into the embodied practices and cultural imaginaries of digitally mediated creativity, which can shed light on the paradoxical entanglements of infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ugandan and South African contemporary women's narratives reflect on the rapid pace of change in the social lives of women in two countries that are contending with the aftermath of conflict and violence. This article will interrogate how contemporary women writers such as Goretti Kyomuhendo (Whispers from Vera), Zukiswa Wanner (The Madams and Behind Every Successful Man) and Cynthia Jele (Happiness is a Four-Letter Word) are embracing chick-lit as a form of writing, while simultaneously short-circuiting this genre to create an experimental form that allows them to reflect on the realities of women and engage with the contradictions, complexities and ambiguities of contemporary feminine subjectivities. Although chick-lit as a genre has been dismissed as trivial and frivolous, ostensibly because it deals with women's experiences, this article argues that this particular form of chick-lit is more political and attempts to disrupt the original chick-lit by offering a critique of society. It articulates how women see themselves and their relationships with their parents, spouses and, most importantly, female friends; reflects on the challenges that modern women face in the work environment; interrogates women's realities concerning love, marriage and motherhood; explores concepts of sexual desire and intimacy; and negotiates the dilemmas of a patriarchal society, while also confronting issues of class and race. These contemporary women writers are adopting this genre because it allows them to reflect on realities that are complex and uncertain, to transform gender relations, to redefine the roles of women and to construct new feminine subjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examine the racial class, culture and conflict in the plays of African American playwrights. It mentions about the examination of the plays of women playwrights between 1960 and 1980; and also highlights creative and artistic playwright of African American women with the reference of Lorrain Hansberry who depicts characters expressing the conflicts and resolutions of black families.

Drawing on Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TED Talk titled "The Danger of a Single Story," this article explores how African women writers dispel stereotypes or dangerous single stories that have wrongly categorized the over one billion people that make up the continent of Africa. It argues that writers such as Adichie and Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo expose popular stereotypes about African people in their novels through controversial depictions and subject matters as a way to disrupt these stereotypes. It further contends the writers use stereotypes as a point of entry to relate the complex issues and experiences that people face within African societies. The article examines Bulawayo's debut novel We Need New Names and Adichie's third novel Americanah, highlighting ways the authors reclaim and honor the subjectivity of African people by disrupting simplistic ideas about extreme poverty in African nations and challenging beliefs concerning African immigrant experiences in the United States, respectively. Due to increased migration in our globalized world, it is becoming even more important for individuals to lay aside stereotypical ideas, and these writers reveal how stories can play a part as well as their potential to inspire and humanize. Ultimately, African women writers engaging commonplace stereotypes is significant to the overall enterprise of self-liberation and self-definition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study fcocused on analyzing diverse representations of the father figure in the Francophone African novels. Various topics discussed include representation of the father in African women writings, dismantling of phallocentric system for reducing position of father to a child by colonial paternalism, narration of their sufferings.

Africa has produced some of the more exciting literary works of the 21stcentury, and most were written by women. One of the things that these women have in common is their preoccupation with the pain that the African woman's body is subjected to by her society due to her gender. The writers are not shy about being called feminists, quite in contrast to the generation of writers before theirs. How are we to understand the concerns of these writers? What is the relationship between their feminist concerns and those of their literary and intellectual foremothers in Africa? This article re-examines African feminism, and suggests feminist empathy as a theoretical approach to African women's writings. Using Lola Shoneyin's novel The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives as an example, I argue that the writers employ the riches of empathy as a social, liberatory virtue that not only throws light on the pains of ordinary Africans, but also can enhance human flourishing in African communities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Building on Africanist and third wave feminist critiques of Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, this essay examines how the notion of diaspora is interpreted by non-anglophone women writers of African descent. In particular, it focuses on the work and careers of two women authors: Afro-Brazilian novelist and academic Conceição Evaristo and Mozambican fiction writer and essayist Paulina Chiziane. Both of these authors participate in international events about the black diaspora and their work has been widely translated. Despite playing active roles in transnational academic and literary communities, however, these two authors repeatedly focus on national concerns in their fiction. The essay argues that many black women writers privilege domestic spaces, such as home and nation, over the space of the black diaspora. Finally, the essay uses reflections on Evaristo's and Chiziane's work to revise Toni Morrison's role in Gilroy's black Atlantic, starting with her most recent novel, Home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on the idea that the study of literary genres needs to take into consideration not only the formal features of the text but also the different contractual modalities which might appear in their reception. In other words, a text is only part of a specific writing genre when it is recognized as such by the addressee, operation which, although entailing certain theoretical knowledge, has a pragmatic character. It will be the reader who, individually and relying on all the data at his disposal, will decide the reading process which he finds more appropriate. In this paper we will try to show this process by analysing a corpus of autobiographical texts written by the first generation of African French-speaking female writers, a choice which aims to meet at the same time the criteria of cohesion (all the writers share the same social-historical context) and of representation, as we think that our conclusions are transferable to similar corpora, in particular to those which derive from the so called "emerging literatures". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An examination of representations of human sexuality in Lola Shoneyin's first novel, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives, this essay focuses on the bold, sincere, and irreverent treatment of the twinned subject of adultery and illicit sexual love. It discusses Shoneyin's re-definition of love and paternity and compares the treatment of sexual love by first- and third-generation African women writers. Adultery is not only a devious device by Baba Segi's wives to find a solution to their husband's sterility but also a revolutionary transformation of gender relations in favour of women, long oppressed by patriarchy. The novel is a prime example of radical feminist writing in which traditional values that keep women in bondage are cast overboard and startling novelties are celebrated in the tridentate name of female emancipation, gender equality, and social justice. Symbolic of male supremacy in misogynous, phallocentric writing, the figure of the penis is deconstructed and its connotations of machismo and intellectual, moral, and physical superiority are negated. Through image-inversion, the pen is appropriated by the novelist and man is rendered powerless. Far from being a pornographic nostrum, the novel is a powerful mirror shocking readers out of complacency into acute recognition of the need to liberate women from the tyranny of polygyny; accordingly, it teems with the sins and language of patriarchy and subversive counter-discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although it has been in existence for a while, Zambian literature is lagging behind the literatures from other African countries in terms of critical acclaim and exposure to international audiences. This contribution by an award-winning literary practitioner explores its author's positioning within (and towards) the field of ‘African literature’. It also examines some of the reasons why Zambian literature is ‘playing catch-up’ with literature from other African countries, and discusses the challenges of writing for an international market. The article also discusses ways in which Zambian literature can develop and make its mark on the international literary map. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Several studies have been done on the subjugation and oppression of women in African literature as portrayed in gyno-texts written overtime from the continent. Quite a number of these studies refer to the change in the perspective of the woman writer, with only a few actually identifying and naming the changes as appropriate. These few have done their classification based on the study of gyno-texts from the entire African continent as a homogenous entity, whereas the development in the consciousness of the African woman writer has been different across countries and genres. This paper therefore, examines the growth in the consciousness of the woman writer in Nigeria prose fiction (an imaginary story, usually written, that someone tells in everyday/natural language) with a critical analysis of Efuru, Joys of Motherhood and Everything Good will Come as it identifies and names the various phases based on the observed differences in the thematic and stylistic pre-occupations of the authors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Black African women writers have been publishing for well over five decades. They have, through their works, attempted to lend agency to hitherto objectified female characters within male dominated literary discourse. In spite of this laudable contribution, their works have received little critical attention from both sides of gender. Likewise, Tsitsi Dangarembga has not received enough critical attention, despite her making a distinct and worthy contribution towards an unbiased depiction of the plight of women on the African literary scene. This paper traces how Dangarembga's novel Nervous Conditions takes such a cause further by essentially interrogating the concept of agency manifested in choice, together with its attendant social reconfigurations. The means by which Dangarembga's outstanding literary innovation is demonstrated is the investigation of the characters Lucia and Nyasha within the framework of the misrepresentation of Black African women in the fiction of Black Africans writing in English. It will be investigated how the choices of women characters affect the lives of other women characters in the novel in a manner that enriches the discourse of social change/transformation. Thus Lucia and Nyasha show that women can stand up for themselves and become liberated in a male dominated society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the evolution of scholarly writing by Anglophone African born women scholars and theorists over the last twenty-five years. It asks and answers questions about the geographic and thematic spread of these women's writing; the relationship between African and non-African born women scholars of the African world; and the conversation that their published narratives have had with one another. It considers the following questions: are African women scholars and their non-African counterparts working on similar themes? Does scholarship written by African women complicate, affirm, or otherwise offer up a different narrative from that written by non-African born scholars? What, if any, tensions have arisen between these scholars over the reading, writing, and interpretation of historical evidence? What about similarities, differences, and evolutions in the writing of African women's worlds by African born scholars? Last, but not least, this short article ponders the question, where does gender fit into African women's narratives? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internationally and locally, crime fiction is a literary genre that has been gaining large numbers of readers as well as increasing academic attention.These texts offer imaginative spaces where authors can expose and critique social problems. Margie Orford's crime fiction offers an avenue through which to explore the pervasive presence of violence in the lives of South African women and children. A number of feminist literary scholars have, however, questioned whether the traditionally male genre of the crime novel can be adapted by women authors to voice the experiences of female characters. Although the challenges presented by the genre are real, the analysis suggests that Orford succeeds, at least partially, in contributing to the larger feminist project of revealing the ubiquity of gender violence in contemporary society. The horrifically violent crimes that constitute the main plot elements of Orford's novels emerge as merely the most extreme examples of the gender violence that has become a normalized part of many women and girls' daily lived realities. This article offers a feminist literary analysis of Orford's novels through the rubric of foundational and contemporary gender scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article looks into the thematic of homecoming to the African continent in the novels Juletane by Myriam Warner-Vieyra, Kehinde by Buchi Emecheta and Loin de Mon Père by Véronique Tadjo. This reading sets out to bring together the notions of diaspora and nationhood, which are often conceived as mutually exclusive. It argues for the importance of an emphatic reintroduction of the African nation state and its disturbing failures of decolonization onto the postcolonial theoretical agenda, which is currently more concerned with somewhat unidirectional manifestations of transnational mobility. The novels under scrutiny rewrite the diasporic romance of return from a gendered viewpoint, exposing the inhospitable nature of the postcolonial African nation state towards the female revenants. While the novels' settings vary greatly from each other, they all represent the gendered diasporic return to the national home as a practical impossibility. Read together, the novels display an interesting continuum of postcolonial disillusionment by giving voice to the failed narrative of the postcolonial African projects of nation-building. While the dream of return literally dies in Juletane and is understood as a realistic impossibility in Kehinde, it seems that Loin de Mon Père, in its outright disillusionment, paradoxically articulates the most hopeful vision of the three novels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a comparative critical study of five African women poets. It encompasses a critique of women poets selected from different parts of Africa. The poets are as follows: Konie, Hawoldar, Djabali, Rungana, and Amadiume. This study shows that if there is one characteristic that these poets share, it is the theme of patriarchy. In this sense, all the poems have broadly similar problems. But there are significant differences in the ways they react to patriarchy. For her part, Konie focuses on the equality of the sexes. The most remarkable feature uniting the poems of Hawoldar, Djabali, and Rungano is their conservative attitude, while Amadiume adopts a radical approach to patriarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gendered identity in Africa has for centuries been a hotbed of ideological and narrative contestations. While colonial constructions of the African female were generally essentialist and negative in character, early postcolonial African literature also ironically deployed essentialisms and rigid gender binaries to portray African womanhood, thus prompting a challenge of both by female African writers of the first generation. However, in a significant twist, second generation Nigerian women writers were to restore the related tropes of wifehood and motherhood to the front burner. This article examines the corresponding models of representation of gendered identity and the inherent, and complex, negotiation of gendered power relations over time in Nigerian postcolonial literature. These models, which we describe here as "essentialism entrenched", "essentialism challenged" and "essentialism negotiated" are examined against the background of gender theory and African womanist discourse. The essay observes that the resurgence of motherhood, albeit in mediated/transformative forms in Nigerian women writing, underscores the continuing challenge of culture in the formation of African gendered identities and in relation to societal development. The work of Akachi Ezeigbo, a leading Nigerian female writer of the second generation, is used in the article to illustrate this resurgence and its interface with womanist theorizing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the possibilities of extracting biographies of ‘ordinary Africans’, especially women, from the epistolary networks of a transcontinental Lutheran community of readers. Due to the enthusiastic efforts of a number of German deaconesses, women from British colonial Africa whose narrations might otherwise not have been recorded, participated in conversations with women in Nazi, and thereafter West as well as East Germany. Mission evidence supports the argument that in colonial Africa religion opened up one of the few spaces for African and European women to collaborate in an otherwise segregated society. While the network was initiated in the name of their common faith and sustained with German church funding (and British colonial infrastructure), the content of the letters was far from restricted to religious matters. The article contends that these epistles reflected an awareness amongst rural female African participants of their position in a much larger geopolitical space – and even a world church. Thus the label ‘ordinary’ refers to the status of the African women writers in their local communities and church congregations rather than their horizons of expectation. Their fragmentary biographies or life-histories, from both colonial Tanganyika and the Transvaal, need to be viewed within the context of their interaction with their German facilitators and the members of the female Christian reading community in Europe – who were the intended audience envisaged by the African women narrators. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the 1990s, women's writing about war in Africa took a new turn as Yvonne Vera and Calixthe Beyala began to publish texts interweaving explicit sexual descriptions and graphic violence. With their examination of sexual relationships in the context of the Nigerian and Sierra Leonean civil wars, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun and Aminatta Forna's The Memory of Love continue this trend. Why is it that female African writers are currently turning to sensuality as a means to explore conflict? This article argues that sex and violence are intricately interwoven and that the examination of sexual pleasure in these novels forms both a language and strategy with which to explore and contest violence against women. In doing so, it draws on theoretical insights about the sexual nature of outsider perspectives on conflict, the political choices involved in describing gender-based violence, and the crucial role of intimacy in representing war and wounding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Humania del Sur: Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos, Africanos y Asiáticos is the property of Humania del Sur. Estudios Latinoamericanos Africanos y Asiaticos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Propelled by politics, sub-Saharan African women's fiction witnessed a phenomenal growth in the twentieth century. On the basis of African women's primary role in early child education and the transmission of oral literature, their creative writing, after their exclusion from the public sphere, represents attempts at the re-appropriation of lost literary space and discursive power. This essay seeks to study the contestatory elements constitutive of the literary production by African women writers from the late 1940s to the end of the twentieth century. The essay establishes that two phases emerge from this creativity. First, between 1947 and 1974, female African women's writing is marked by the politicization of the domestic. In the second cycle, spanning the period 1975-2000, feminist African creative writing is characterized by the deepening and radicalization of the already politicized private realm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores how the erotic and women's sexuality were expressed in the literature of African women writers Luz Argentina Chiriboga and Mayra Santos Febres. Sexual subjectivity and agency were expressed in Chiriboga's novel "Bajo la piel de los tambores." Meanwhile, in Febres' short story "Marina y su olor," erotic was used as a source of empowerment.

The article explores the ouble bind inherit in the poetry of African female writers Carmen Colón Pellot and Julia de Burgos. In double bind, African female authors are striving to identify themselves as both blacks and women. According to the author, Pellot and de Burgos created female literary poetics which focused on mulata as the writing subject, rather than a written object. Both authors found it difficult to reconcile their mulata heritage in a Hispanic society dominated by while males.

Copyright of African Studies Review is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The non-inscription of women in the process of forming national identities in anticolonial discourse is often constructed on differential and hierarchical polarizations which engender counter-productive identities of women in the African postcolonies. This exclusion privileges skewed monologues of masculine iconographies which have political and positional resonances in the identification of women. African women writers, however, engage in contesting the sociocultural and ideological structures that engender their occlusion from the important sites of nationhood, national literary canons and identities. The critical parameters of this study, therefore, emerge from an investigation of the postcolonial context of the possibilities of reconfiguring modern African political and literary discourse, suggesting in its process a displacement of the assumptive traditional, masculinist ethos and the inauguration and reconstruction of a more inclusive sociocultural order. A beginning point in this process requires a critique of existing masculinist hegemonies prevalent in African literature. This is typified by Nigerian female writer Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo in her novel The Last of the Strong Ones (1996). This novel provides the linchpin for the critique of and opposition to the fetishization of oppressive tradition found in much postcolonial writing. The dual process of the reconstruction of new self-images of women and the deconstruction of masculinities is the two-hander structure of this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Zoë Wicomb's four works of fiction deploy realist techniques, they show a deep and increasingly self-conscious interest in using the strategies of textualism, in which the real is seen to be grounded in discourse, materiality is inscribed in allegorising ciphers or signs, and the presented world has the status of textuality rather than being representational. Her short stories and novels address, adjust and re-imagine history - not simply by interrogating the intersecting discourses by means of which certain historical concepts are conventionally managed and understood but also by undoing the apparent opposition between history and text. These strategies constitute what is, in effect, a struggle over the sign. In the process, Wicomb's fiction moves in what may be called a double aesthetic and political direction. Her fiction yearns for a writing released from 'history' and 'meaning' and yet directed to truth-telling about varieties of subordination; it also yearns for a world in which human subjects - and language - can shake somewhat free of history and be born renewed, so that history in another sense can come fully alive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a close reading of the sea - as trope, archive, and living presence - in Wicomb's oeuvre. Charting the undercurrents of meaning rippling across Wicomb's texts, it finds in the sea an emblem of Wicomb's aesthetic and ethical concerns. The sea is shown to house an archive that challenges nationalist histories and unsettles their temporal divisions, throwing textual meaning and identities into flux. It summons readers to recognise the uncanny return of repressed narratives and to embark on trans-oceanic readings of local and land-bound narratives and histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Societes Contemporaines is the property of Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)