By Shireen Hassim Three decades have passed since dramatic changes in authoritarian societies – the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of one-party and military regimes in Africa and Latin America – generated feminist interest in formal political institutions.A substantial body of literature in the social sciences began to seriously address the question of…
Category: Reviews
Women and the War on Boko Haram: Wives, Weapons, Witnesses by Hilary Matfess
By Títílope F. Ajàyí Women and the War on Boko Haram is a bold and coherent effort to decolonise victim narratives about women’s roles in, and experiences of, the conflict in Nigeria’s northeast. Before this book, although there had been a growing focuson women as perpetrators and enablers of violence by scholars like Freedom Onuoha,…
The Remaking of Social Contracts: Feminists in a Fierce New World. Edited by Gita Sen and Marina Durano for DAWN. London: Zed Books, 2014
DAWN – Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era – has produced a fine-grained, well-articulated vision in its latest offering, The Remaking of Social Contracts: Feminists in a Fierce New World. The book invites us to imagine what the authors characterise as a “fierce new world,” which is obviously a counterpoint or perhaps complement…
Regarding Muslims: From Slavery to Postapartheid. By Gabeba Baderoon. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2014.
Regarding Muslims: From Slavery to Postapartheid is a pioneering study that examines historical and contemporary representations of Islam and Muslims in South Africa. With intellectual sophistication and creativity, Gabeba Baderoon examines varying forms of visual, culinary, artistic and popular representations in ways that speak back to official historical and colonial records. She reads against the…
Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul. By Tanisha C. Ford. Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2015
Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul spans four continents, eighteen countries and the socio-historical planes of black liberation struggles in the black diaspora, and in Africa to a lesser extent, to explore the ways in which black women’s resistance has been visible and concentrated not only in actions within political…
Collective Amnesia, by Koleka Putuma. Cape Town: Uhlanga, 2017
By Uhuru Phalafala The release of Koleka Putuma’s debut collection Collective Amnesia officially positions her within an ongoing global feminist dialogue with black female poets who utilise poetry as a vehicle to confront their particularised oppressions as women of colour. These young writers, be it Somalian Warsan Shire, Indian Rupi Kaur, Sudanese Safia Elhillo, or…
Beauty of the Heart: The Life and Times of Charlotte Mannya Maxeke by Zubeida Jaffer. Cape Town: ZJ Books, 2016
By Gabeba Baderoon Questions of lineage mark much contemporary writing by Black women, from Nomboniso Gasa’s Women in South African History (2007) to Koleka Putuma’s Collective Amnesia (2017), signaling a longing for beginnings and continuity in the face of the vast silences and abrupt severing which mar so much of South African history. In Beauty…
Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism, by Karima Bennoune. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015
By Charmaine Pereira In a world marked by the proliferation of violent jihadi groups, what can be done to turn the tide against Muslim fundamentalism? This question lies at the heart of Karima Bennoune’s Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism. Bennoune’s award-winning book focuses on the struggles…
Rape: A South African Nightmare, by Pumla Dineo Gqola. Johannesburg: MF Books, an imprint of Jacana Media (PTY) Ltd, 2015
By Jane Bennett I make the assertion that rape is not a moment but a language…and I untangle and decipher the knots and codes of this language, to surface its structure, underline its histories, understand its rules. (Gqola, 2015: 22) In the two years since the publication of Pumla Gqola’s third book, Rape: A South…