The challenge that this presents is for innovativeness in contesting discourses, practices and identities that police our rights, freedoms and desires. Contributions to this issue explore these courageous interventions by showing how creative writers have struggled with language, as the key repository and instrument of our cultures, to re-envisage how we see ourselves and our worlds. These contributions reveal the significance of cultural expression in unravelling the layers of silenced or mystified belief that work to confine our worlds and our sense of a place within them. The relevance of this realm of cultural production to feminist research, therefore, is that it can open up "humanistic concerns", "holistic paradigms" and "expansive methodologies", rather than underscore "technocratic approaches to development, dedicated to the service of national and international policy-makers and bureaucracies of the development industry" (Mama, 1997: 76).
2003, Archive, Cover, Feminist Africa Issue 2. 2003: Changing Cultures feminist_africa_issue_2._2003_changing_cultures_-_african_gender_institute_-_2012-06-13