A critical discussion of African Feminism as an exponent of Feminist Theory

A critical discussion of African Feminism as an exponent of Feminist Theory PDF Author: Anna Ihle
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640295870
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 9

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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject African Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 80 Prozent, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University (School of Governmental and Social Science), course: Seminar: Women in Africa, language: English, abstract: Feminism isn’t the same everywhere. As the idea of equality between men and women spread around the globe, a fragmentation could be observed. Not everywhere were the concepts and images, created by American middle-class feminists, as well applicable and appropriate as in their original setting. The development of a Black feminism followed and was further challenged by the emergence of an African subdivision, which introduced new perspectives of colour, race, ethnicity and sexuality to the debate (Maerten 2004: 1). The question arises if African feminism can be seen as an exponent to feminist theory as for instance liberal or radical feminism. Is the focusing on a particular group of people by region or ethnicity in the same way a valid division of an approach as the dissection for the reason of differing goals? In this paper the author wants to discuss the position of African feminism within the entire concept. After defining the two major terms feminist theory and African Feminism, a general register of the differences as well as the similarities mean to draw an important comparison between the different perspectives. The final part will provide a review of the mentioned aspects of the debate to lead the reader to a position, where he can draw his own conclusions and opinions from.

Contested Bodies

Contested Bodies PDF Author: Sasha Turner
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 081229405X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
It is often thought that slaveholders only began to show an interest in female slaves' reproductive health after the British government banned the importation of Africans into its West Indian colonies in 1807. However, as Sasha Turner shows in this illuminating study, for almost thirty years before the slave trade ended, Jamaican slaveholders and doctors adjusted slave women's labor, discipline, and health care to increase birth rates and ensure that infants lived to become adult workers. Although slaves' interests in healthy pregnancies and babies aligned with those of their masters, enslaved mothers, healers, family, and community members distrusted their owners' medicine and benevolence. Turner contends that the social bonds and cultural practices created around reproductive health care and childbirth challenged the economic purposes slaveholders gave to birthing and raising children. Through powerful stories that place the reader on the ground in plantation-era Jamaica, Contested Bodies reveals enslaved women's contrasting ideas about maternity and raising children, which put them at odds not only with their owners but sometimes with abolitionists and enslaved men. Turner argues that, as the source of new labor, these women created rituals, customs, and relationships around pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing that enabled them at times to dictate the nature and pace of their work as well as their value. Drawing on a wide range of sources—including plantation records, abolitionist treatises, legislative documents, slave narratives, runaway advertisements, proslavery literature, and planter correspondence—Contested Bodies yields a fresh account of how the end of the slave trade changed the bodily experiences of those still enslaved in Jamaica.

Feminist African Philosophy

Feminist African Philosophy PDF Author: Abosede Priscilla Ipadeola
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000636194
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
The book argues that women's perspectives and gender issues must be mainstreamed across African philosophy in order for the discipline to truly represent the thoughts of Africans across the continent. African philosophy as an academic discipline emerged as a direct challenge to Western and Eurocentric hegemonies. It sought to actualize the project of decolonization and to contribute African perspectives to global discourses. There has, however, been a dominance of male perspectives in this field of human knowledge. This book argues that African philosophy cannot claim to have liberated people of African descent from marginalization until the androcentric nature of African philosophy is addressed. Key concepts such as Ujamaa, Negritude, Ubuntu, Consciencism, and African Socialism are explored as they relate to African women's lives or as models of inclusion or exclusion from politics. In addition to offering a feminist critique of African philosophy, the book also discusses topics that have been consistently overlooked in African philosophy. These topics include sex, sexuality, rape, motherhood, prostitution, and the low participation of women in politics. By highlighting the work of women feminist scholars such as Oyeronke Oyewumi, Nkiru Nzegwu, Ifi Amadiume, Amina Mama, and Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, the book engages with African philosophy from an African feminist viewpoint. This book will be an essential resource for students and researchers of African philosophy and gender studies.

Sisterhood, Feminisms, and Power

Sisterhood, Feminisms, and Power PDF Author: Obioma Nnaemeka
Publisher: Africa Research and Publications
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 548

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Book Description
This volume, which gathers prominent scholars, feminists, womanists, and creative writers from Africa and the African Diaspora, engages with candor and vigor issues and conflicts in feminism and black women studies - feminism and womanism debates, sisterhood and power struggles, research and documentation questions, elite and grassroots women relationship, urban and rural dichotomy, African and the African Diaspora relationship. Focusing on the pluralism of feminisms, these essays address the conflict between indigenous African feminisms and the radicalism of variants of Western feminism with their emphasis on sexuality and seeming oppositions to motherhood. They collectively argue that the African environment specifically should provide the context for any meaningful analysis of feminisms on the continent. The volume weaves theoretical questions, personal and collective engagements into a complex tapestry that spans Africa and the African Diaspora - from women organizing for change in South Africa and women's insurgency against colonialism in Nigeria to the problems of doing research on women in Uganda and building of a sisterhood in Memphis, Tennessee.

The Palgrave Handbook of African Women's Studies

The Palgrave Handbook of African Women's Studies PDF Author: Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9783030280987
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This definitive handbook is the first reference of its kind bringing together knowledge, scholarship, and debates on themes and issues concerning African women everywhere. It unearths, critiques, reviews, analyses, theorizes, synthesizes and evaluates African women’s historical, social, political, economic, local and global lives and experiences with a view to decolonizing the corpus. This Handbook questions the gendered roles and positions of African women and the structures, institutions, and processes of policy, politics, and knowledge production that continually construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct African women and the study of them. Contributors offer a consistent emphasis on debunking erroneous and misleading myths about African women's roles and positions, bringing their previously marginalized stories to relief, and ultimately re-writing their histories. Thus, this Handbook enlarges the scope of the field, challenges its orthodoxies, and engenders new subjects, theories, and approaches. This reference work includes, to the greatest extent possible, the voices of African women themselves as writers of their own stories. The detailed, rigorous and up-to-date analyses in the work represent a variety of theoretical, methodological, and transdisciplinary approaches. This reference work will prove vital in charting new directions for the study of African women, and will reverberate in future studies, generating new debates and engendering further interest.

African Feminisms

African Feminisms PDF Author: Alicia C. Decker
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781478004974
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
This special issue, edited by the co-directors of the African Feminist Initiative (AFI) at Pennsylvania State University, is a partnership between Meridians and the AFI. The issue builds on the AFI's work to promote the study of African feminist thought and activism within the U.S. academy and to create equitable partnerships between scholars and practitioners of African feminism. Through the multiplicity of feminisms theorized in this issue, contributors challenge patriarchal ideologies and structures on myriad fronts, both on the African continent and beyond. The issue includes poetry, memoirs, essays, interviews, reflections, and testimonials on African feminisms, addressing such topics as hip hop, ethnography, secessionist movements, "saving" Nigerian girls, and women's writing. Contributors. Gabeba Baderoon, Abena P. A. Busia, Ginetta E. B. Candelario, Msia Kibona Clark, Alicia C. Decker, Chipo Dendere, Abosede George, Tsitsi Jaji, Selina Makana, Patricia McFadden, Anne Moraa, Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué, Neo Sinoxolo Musangi, Wambui Mwangi, Aziza Ouguir, Charmaine Pereira, Fatima Sadiqi, Toni Stuart, Makhosazana Xaba, Ntokozo Yingwana

Globalization, Feminism, and Power

Globalization, Feminism, and Power PDF Author: Mojubaolu Olufunke Okome
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Africans
Languages : en
Pages : 32

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Book Description


Anna Julia Cooper, Visionary Black Feminist

Anna Julia Cooper, Visionary Black Feminist PDF Author: Vivian M. May
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113591155X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Vivian M. May explores the theoretical and political contributions of Anna Julia Cooper, a renowned Black feminist scholar, educator and activist whose ideas deserve far more attention than they have received. Drawing on Africana and feminist theory, May places Cooper's theorizing in its historical contexts and offers new ways to interpret the evolution of Cooper's visionary politics, subversive methodology, and defiant philosophical outlook. Rejecting notions that Cooper was an elitist duped by dominant ideologies, May contends that Cooper's ambiguity, code-switching, and irony should be understood as strategies of a radical methodology of dissent. May shows how across six decades of work, Cooper traced history's silences and delineated the workings of power and inequality in an array of contexts, from science to literature, economics to popular culture, religion to the law, education to social work, and from the political to the personal. May emphasizes that Cooper eschewed all forms of mastery and called for critical consciousness and collective action on the part of marginalized people at home and abroad. She concludes that in using a border-crossing, intersectional approach, Cooper successfully argues for theorizing from experience, develops inclusive methods of liberation, and crafts a vision of a fundamentally egalitarian social imaginary.

Black Women, Agency, and the New Black Feminism

Black Women, Agency, and the New Black Feminism PDF Author: Maria del Guadalupe Davidson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317550447
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 163

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Book Description
The powerful Beyoncé, formidable Rihanna, and the incalculable Nikki Minaj. Their images lead one to wonder: are they a new incarnation of black feminism and black women’s agency, or are they only pure fantasy in which, instead of having agency, they are in fact the products of the forces of patriarchy and commercialism? More broadly, one can ask whether black women in general are only being led to believe that they have power but are really being drawn back into more complicated systems of exploitation and oppression. Or, are black women subverting patriarchy by challenging notions of their subordinate and exploitable sexuality? In other words, ‘who is playing who’? Black Women, Agency, and the New Black Feminism identifies a generational divide between traditional black feminists and younger black women. While traditional black feminists may see, for example, sexualized images of black women negatively and as an impediment to progress, younger black women tend to embrace these new images and see them in a positive light. After carefully setting up this divide, this enlightening book will suggest that a more complex understanding of black feminist agency needs to be developed, one that is adapted to the complexities faced by the younger generation in today’s world. Arguing the concept of agency as an important theme for black feminism, this innovative title will appeal to scholars, teachers, and students interested in black feminist and feminist philosophy, identity construction, subjectivity and agency, race, gender, and class.

African Feminism

African Feminism PDF Author: Gwendolyn Mikell
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812215809
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
"This book is the best thing I've seen on the question--not only of 'feminism' in its African articulation but also, more generally, on the question of how feminism emerges and what it means to those who espouse it."--Joan Scott, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton