Book Review: Achille Mbembe: Sortir de la Grande Nuit: Essai sur l'Afrique Décolonisée. We Must Get Out of the Great Night: Essay on Decolonized Africa. International Feminist Journal of Politics. Special Issue: Murderous Inclusions. Vol. 15, no.4 (2013) : 565-567. (original) (raw)
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Knowles c 2021 review Decolonization and Afro Feminism
If I could, I would introduce Sylvia Tamale with singing and dancingan aptly Afro-Feminist way to honour an author whose reputation as a thinker, scholar, and activist is renowned. She stands on the shoulders of her ancestors and dedicates her book to Wanafunzi wa Afrika (the students of Africa), for whom this is a rare and valuable gift. Decolonization and Afro-Feminism is an epic testament to Tamale's courageous political and intellectual rigour, it imagines a world with reconfigured social institutions that restore dignity to African people. Although much of her formal training and work has been in law, Tamale's activism and scholarship have crossed many disciplinary boundaries, notably in the fields of gender and sexuality, jurisprudence, and politics, all with an African feminist framing. Decolonization and Afro-Feminism brings together all of these interests in a textual and empirical analysis of colonialism's effects and their potential undoing. Decolonial studies is a growing field, with scholars from the Global South building on the work of Edward Said, Franz Fanon, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and others who helped to shape the post-colonial discourse in the 20th century. The twenty-first century has seen Walter Mignolo, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Ramon Grosfogel, Arturo Escobar, and many others guiding the conversation with a focus on 'decoloniality', which Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni argues 'is not a singular theoretical school of thought, but a family of diverse positions that share a view of coloniality as the fundamental problem in the modern age' (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013, 15; emphasis added). The field is not without its contestations. In a recent editorial, Siseko Kumalo and Leonard Praeg make a scathing accusation that mediocre scholars can and have co-opted the 'discourse and praxis' (Kumalo and Praeg 2019) of decoloniality to re-inscribe the marginality of Black/Indigenous people by a failure to engage with empirical and substantive evidence and voices. This charge struck a chord. A frustration for me has been the paucity of African women's voices in the carefully curated global conversation, for instance in edited volumes with multiple authors. Like panel discussions on webinar, these showcases of scholarship are opportunities to put politics into practice, right? Two recent volumes I bought to supplement the African feminism I have been reading reveal more than the topics anticipated in the contents page. The first, Constructing the Pluriverse: The Geopolitics of Knowledge (2018) edited by Bernd Reiter, has 15 chapters, only 5 of them by womenthere is one African author, a man. Notwithstanding the excellent contributions to the ideas of decoloniality with its focus on plurality in the politics and hierarchy of knowledge, it is as though African women have nothing to say here. The second purchase was Knowledges Born of the Struggle: Constructing the Epistemologies of the Global South (2020), edited by Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Maria Paula Meneses. Of the 13 chapters, 4 are written by women, one of them the Mozambican coeditor, and one chapter is written by an African man. Surely, in a field that unpicks the legacies of imperial, patriarchal, anthropocentric colonialism and how it positions African women in the social and knowledge hierarchies, more African women could be invited to speak for themselves? This book review was originally
No African Futures without the Liberation of Women: A Decolonial Feminist Perspective
Africa Development, 2015
Coloniality of gender speaks to the perennial question of the liberation of women from various forms of oppression. The 'modern' world system and its global order have remained fundamentally patriarchal. This implies that any initiative aimed at creating African futures has to address the fundamental question of the liberation of women. Liberation of women does not speak to the incorporation of women within the patriarchal system. The first step, as Thomas Sankara said in his 1987 speech, is to understand how the patriarchal system functions, to grasp its real nature in all its subtlety, in order to work out a line of action that can lead to women's genuine emancipation. Decolonising gender therefore becomes a necessary task so that answers to what should be done are formulated from the perspective of asking correct questions. Decolonising gender is to enact a critique of racialized, colonial, and capitalist heterosexualist gender oppression as a lived transformation of the social (Lugones 2010). As such, decolonizing gender places the scholar in the midst of people in a historical, peopled, subjective/intersubjective understanding of the oppressing-resisting relation at the intersection of complex systems of oppression. To a significant extent, it has to be in accord with the subjectivities and intersubjectivities that construct and in part are constructed by the situation. This article deploys decolonial feminist ideas of Thomas Sankara, amomg others, to push forward the frontiers of the struggle for the liberation of women as a constitutive part of initiatives of creating African futures. Its central argument is that women's liberation struggle should not be reduced to efforts of incorporation of women within the patriarchal, colonial and imperial modern system/s women seek to reject. Making use of Maria Lugones' theoretical framework, we should be able to understand that the instrumentality of the colonial/modern gender system is subjecting both men and women of colour in all domains of existence and therefore allows us to reveal that the gender transformation discourse is not just a women's emancipation discourse but rather efforts of both men and women to
African Feminism as a Decolonizing Force
In recent times, the word, "Feminism" has been greeted with some much disdain than it has ever been since the advent of women"s rights and empowerment. If you are like me, you might have also wondered why this seemingly harmless word, has gotten the backlash from men and women alike. Everybody wants to be identified as a feminist yet no one knows or agrees to what it truly represents, nor are they willing to support its ideology. Unpredictably, and though this is expected, there are many individuals who believe in equal rights but find "feminism" a word and a movement that doesn"t align with their tradition, religion or value system. Some of these are deeply rooted in our personal, socio-cultural, religious and traditional beliefs, even as we see in the Africa continent. After all, the African Tradition posit that "Women have no tribe or gender"─ and this throws almost throws the issues of feminism right out of the window.
Hypatia
's anthology Decolonizing Feminism: Transnational Feminism and Globalization addresses a broad range of issues that underscore the importance of decolonizing feminist theory. Chapters included in this book examine a wide variety of approaches to decolonizing feminism from a transnational and global perspective. Theorists champion Indigenous feminism, global and communal forms of knowledge, collective movements that emphasize women's rights, citizenship, care chains and democratic processes, home in a global worker context, and the plight of refugee women, to name a few. These issues demonstrate the need for feminism to have a transnational, decolonial, and global lens. McLaren and the authors in the anthology face these challenges head-on. The result is a bold and innovative anthology that makes a significant contribution to feminist philosophy. Decolonizing Feminism links feminism and decoloniality by joining the conversation about decoloniality begun and sustained by Anibal Quijano,
Decolonial African feminism for white allies
Journal of international women's studies, 2020
Feminism is a word, a discourse and a political position that is frequently met with suspicion in African circles. There are various reasons for this distrust. Some (often those in disciplines that have proactively embraced decoloniality) hold that feminism is a western colonizing construct, which has been imposed on the country by imperialists. This response implicitly or explicitly accuses feminism of complicity with a colonizing agenda that desires the subordination of African epistemologies. Others equate a feminist political position with an uncritical anger and aggression towards men. They argue that, far from being antagonistic towards men, women need to make alliances with men in order to craft an inclusive and sustainable future for the African continent. In the light of these discursive and political contestations, this article argues that centring African feminisms is an important decolonial move. It brings to light the dangers of a universalizing view of African feminism...
Decolonizing knowledges in feminist world politics
International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2018
in May 2016 and is the theme of this special issue arising from it. The continuing annual conferences of this journal seek to identify and coalesce research on emergent and major currents in feminist International Relations (IR) and transnational feminist thought and action. The theme of the 2016 conference and this special issue refers to both sighting decolonizing knowledges already present in feminist world politics inquiry and seeking ways to further decolonize it. Although the "decolonial turn" (Maldonado-Torres 2008) in critical thinking has a long history, embedded in centuries of resistances to colonization and settler colonialism, it is only recently that IR, as a discipline, has been recognized as a fundamentally colonial project. Eurocentric (and later US-centric) colonialism and imperialism both founded and remain constitutive of IR (Barkawi and Laffey 2002; Jones 2006; Tickner 2014). Past and continuing stories of Westphalian "sovereignty and liberal democracy" as the history and foundations of the discipline cover up "the authoritarianism, theft, racism, and in significant cases, massacre and genocide" at the heart of the "colonial state and political economy" that IR represents and legitimizes (Jones 2006, 3-4). Moreover, the structure of contemporary IR knowledge production has been likened to a colonial household in which perspectives of colonized peoples and post-colonial critiques are either consigned to servitude in it or kept outside of it altogether (Agathangelou and Ling 2004). Also relatively recently, feminist studies have been challenged for still present colonial legacies and colonizing moves within it, particularly in the US but also elsewhere. Although gender, ethnic and queer studies have importantly exposed the hegemonies and costs of gendered, racialized, and heteronormative ideologies and structures, without a central interrogation of colonization and particularly settler colonialism, such studies can devolve into "liberal multicultural discourses" that champion "inclusion and equality" within the nation (Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill 2013, 10). These can play into "the expansion of the settler state" by increasing the "opportunity" of previously excluded majorities and minorities to take part in the settling processes that dispossess" Indigenous peoples (Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill 2013, 10). "Indigenous communities' concerns are often not about achieving formal equality and civil rights within a nationstate, but instead achieving substantial independence from a Western nation-stateindependence decided on their own terms" (Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill 2013, 10). Moreover, a neglect of colonialism can mean inattention to the appropriation and destruction of
Literatures on feminist theory abound: they challenge the dominant traditional modernist worldview that uses the male perspective as the standard by which all social phenomena are measured. Thanks to feminists, theories now span the whole range of the ideological spectrum. However, post-colonial feminism is still on the fringes. Rejecting sweeping generalizations, this paper highlights specific cases from Asia and Africa in order to analyze the different actions and discourses of women from the Third World. By so doing, this research contributes to mainstreaming women’s voices from the Global South as well as promoting post-structural analysis which treats women, not as an indistinct unified blob, but as a heterogeneous group of individuals and groups with discrete identities and dissimilar agenda.
Introduction: Decolonizing African Women's Studies
The Palgrave Handbook of African Women's Studies, 2021
The Palgrave Handbook of African Women's Studies is a distinctive reference book bringing together knowledge, scholarship, analysis, and debates on African women's themes and issues everywhere. It unearths, critiques, reviews, analyzes, theorizes, synthesizes, and evaluates African women's historical, social, political, economic, local and global lives, and experiences with a view to decolonizing the corpus. The chapters in this volume question 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. Thus, this Handbook enlarges the scope of the field, challenges its orthodoxies, and engenders new subjects, theories, and approaches. In this way, the Palgrave Handbook of African Women's Studies not only curates but also charts a path for the study of African women in all their variegated contexts and complexities from competing standpoints, centering women in the African world and worldview historically and contemporarily, and from multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary lenses. Importantly too, this Handbook creates space and opportunities for giving voice to African women everywhere to tell their stories and share their experiences, working with African women everywhere, thus representing a space for amplifying African women's voices. This introductory chapter elucidates the objectives of the Handbook; engages the contentions and contestations in African women's studies that propelled its unique decolonial approach; reviews the currents in the field over time; reveals its asymmetries and coloniality; and provides a detailed narrative map for navigating the sections and chapters in the Handbook.
Reflections on a Feminist Now in Places of Undying Colonialism
2017
Reflections on a conference in collaboration between our ERC<br> project, APARTHEID-STOPS, The World Literatures: Cosmopolitan<br> and Vernacular Dynamics Research Programme at Stockholm<br> University and the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research<br> (WiSER) in Johannesburg presented the opportunity for<br> participants to enter into dialogue concerning our different<br> localized and ongoing political struggles.