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”
Category: Reviews
Research As More than Extraction: Knowledge Production and Gender-Based Violence in African Societies edited by Annie Bunting, Allen Kiconco, and Joel Quirk. Ohio University Press, 2023
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.
How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue. New York: Random House, 2021.
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
Cultivating Seeds of Transformation: Reflections on Feminist Popular Education from Mozambique
Popular education approaches have been a means of building a fairer world. This article analyses how the experience of the Female Economic Empowerment in Mozambique known as MUVA, a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) present in Mozambique since 2016, created practical opportunities for emancipatory and transformative learning.
Theory in Action: A Pan-Africanist Online African Feminist Reading Group
African Feminisms, including Pan-African Feminism, emphasise that there are multiple ways of knowing, and that profound knowledge can emerge from unlikely locations and groups. Popular and informal knowledge-making arises from collective and participatory learning platforms generated by the socially and politically marginalised, with the intention to recognise, value, inspire and challenge each other to grow, transform and find liberation.
Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa by Naminata Diabete. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020.
“At the time when I was naked, I felt so powerful… the power even to hit a policeman…” (43). Naminata Diabate in Naked Agency interrogates expressions of resistance that women engage in across Western, Eastern, Southern, and Central Africa and beyond. This resistance, predicated on defiant disrobing, exposure, and shaming, she terms “naked agency”. Diabate…
Critical Engagement with Public Sociology:A Perspective From the Global South, edited by Andries Bezuidenhout, Sonwabile Mnwana, and Karl von Holdt. Public Sociology series. Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2022.
The book looks at the long tradition of critical engagement in research done over the last forty years at the Society,Work and Politics Institute (SWOP), a research institute with a long history of working with movements and communities across South Africa, doing what it calls critical engagement. According to the book’s editors, critical engagement is…
Feminist African Philosophy:Women and the Politics of Difference by Abosede Priscilla Ipadeola. Routledge Studies in African Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2023.
by Sharon Adetutu Omotoso Abosede Ipadeola’s Feminist African Philosophy is a compact book which offers insights into a hitherto under-researched area of African Philosophy. It is presented as a text big enough to educate and small enough to be read for both leisure and research. The main focus of the book is decolonising African feminism…
Fashioning Postfeminism: Spectacular Femininity and Transnational Culture by Simidele Dosekun. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020.
by Belinda Smith Feminism has come a long way. But how far has it really come? Patriarchal structures still exist and are yet to be completely vanquished. However, there may have been some victories achieved in the last few decades that warrant debates around the vexed post-feminist agenda. Simidele Dosekun cleverly utilises beauty politics as…
Tahir’s Youth: Leaderless Revolution, by Rusha Latif
by Kamal Rusha Latif’s Tahrir’sYouth: Leaders of a Leaderless Revolution (2022) joins the body of published books that contribute to a historiography of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. The book opens with an “Introduction” which frames the whole project by addressing leadership in social movements and the agency of young people in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution….