by Afua A. Yeboah and Nana-Anna Abaka-Cann Scholarship on African women, although a subject so vast and consequential, is so persistently marginalised within the disciplines that claim to explain the African world. This textbook, Women in Africa by Toyin Falola and Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso, arrives as a deliberate correction to this erasure. In this comprehensive single-volume…
Category: Archive
Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
by Malaika Selasie Patel Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count is a rich, reflective narrative that navigates the emotional territories of womanhood, class, migration, and desire. Structured through the intimate reflections of Chiamaka, Zikora, Kadiatou, and Omelogor, the book explores how dreams, memory, and identity are shaped by global inequalities and personal longings. Also, through the…
Travelling While Black: Essays Inspired by a Life on the Move by Nanjala Nyabola
by Christian Emmanuel Bruku Nanjala Nyabola’s Travelling While Black: Essays Inspired by a Life on the Move is a thought-provoking collection of travel reflections that probe what it means to move through a world that is hostile to Blackness, genderness, and foreignness. Nyabola’s methodological approach combines a multi-countrycase study with a feminist poststructuralist lens, weaving…
“She Cannot Sit Idle”: Kinship, Class, and Gendered Politics of Women’s Mobility
Dorothy Takyiakwaa speaks with Madeleine Wong, an African woman migration scholar living and working in the United States (US). The conversation focuses on Madeleine’s intellectual journey and her perspectives on the diverse migration experiences for different African women. It also reflects on Madeleine’s social position and mobilities within the US academy and her connection to…
Possibilities of a Feminist Migration Future
by Mary Setrana, Franzisca Zanker and Lena Diakite In this piece, we question whether the implementation of a feminist migration agenda in the political arena is at all possible. Although political inclusion and gender awareness in policymaking, including migration policy, can be counted as successes of feminist organising, this inclusion has largely been formulated and…
Investigating Class Privilege Among Professional Ghanaian Migrants During COVID-19
by Madeleine Wong Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic forced people across the world to grapple with insecurities and deep uncertainties while reworking and reconstituting social life in a globally linked “new normal.” This study investigates how the COVID19 pandemic disrupted the professional and personal lives of highly skilled Ghanaian migrant women and how they adapted to…
A Black Sense of Place: A Cartographic Conversation with Katherine McKittrick
by Christine Vogt-William and Stefan Ouma IntroductionThis keynote conversation took place between Black feminist geographer Katherine McKittrick (Queen’s University, Canada), economic geographer Stefan Ouma (University of Bayreuth, Germany) and literary and cultural studies scholar Christine Vogt-William (University of Bayreuth, Germany) at the 2023 annual conference of the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University…
Work-life (Im)balance among Nigerian Immigrant Women in Canada
by Ọláyínká Damilola Ola-Lawson and Ọláyínká Àkànle AbstractThe increase in international migration since the 1980s has raised new and fundamental gender issues that merit further study and understanding. This is especially so within gender and feminist scholarship because as the numbers of international migrants grow, new gender and feminist realities and contestations will emerge. This…
The Effects of the Government’s COVID-19 Response on Migrant Women Living in Cape Town: Assessing the Coloniality of Citizenship
by Olivia Burton AbstractIn South Africa, the existing system continues to preserve unequal gendered citizenship rights based on colonial and apartheid hierarchies. Despite a rightsbased legal platform, the state reproduces racism, xenophobia, and patriarchy, creating a multitude of vulnerabilities for Black migrant women. The COVID19 pandemic and related restrictions have deepened global inequality, heightening the…
Theorising Gender, Class, and Mobility in Africa: Hegemony, Critiques, and Feminist Interventions
by Faisal Garba and Dorothy Takyiakwaa AbstractDominant migration scholarship has framed African mobility as an empirical anomaly to be explained through theories developed elsewhere, rather than as a starting point for theorising migration itself. This article argues that feminist development frameworks, including Women in Development, Women andDevelopment, and Gender and Development, reproduce the same error:…