Category: Archive

In A Feminist Theory of Violence, Françoise Vergès examines several broad questions concerning feminist theorising about violence. She aims “to contribute to the reflection on violence as a structural element of patriarchy and capitalism, rather than specifically male” (4). Vergès proceeds by eschewing an analysis of “patriarchy through the female victim/male perpetrator prism” (4), instead proposing “a critique of dependency on the police and the judicialization of social issues—in other words, of the spontaneous recourse to the criminal justice system to protect so-called ‘vulnerable’ populations”

Research is more than extraction” is an obvious principle, a mantra, for studies about people’s lives and most especially the lives of those who have suffered and still do from unimaginable yet all too frequent gender-based violence in times of wars and armed conflicts. Yet, historically, researchers from various disciplines have simply extracted “data” as impersonal bits and pieces, commodifying survivors’ experiences before leaving the research sites, never to be heard from or to return. Papers and books are published and nothing more is said or done.

Most of these were Northern (Mbue lives in New York) and the book was heralded in the New York Times as one of the 10 best novels of 2021. Writing with some awe, reviewer El Akkad eulogised Mbue’s narrative of the resistances through which the fictional village of Kosawa seeks to survive being poisoned, attacked, and wearied into near-death, and then death, by the politics of oil extractivism under the control of Pexton, a United States-based company