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.
Category: Reviews
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….
Prison Notebook by Gertrude Fester
Self-published, 2022. by Desiree Lewis South African feminist writer, Gertrude Fester, was among the group of political prisoners who spent over 100 days in solitary confinement on Robben Island in the mid-1980s. In what became known as the Yengeni Trial, the trial of this group of activists, as well as their detention, dramatic accusation for…
African Women in Digital Spaces Redefining Social Movements on the Continent and in the Diaspora by Msia Kibona Clark and Wunpini Fatimata Mohammed. Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers Ltd, 2023
by Amanda Odoi Social media activism has become a pivotal global tool in recent decades for pushing and extending the feminist agenda, particularly among young feminists. With the widespread availability of smartphones and easy access to social media platforms, users now have access to a plethora of information on subjects ranging from news and gossip…
Surfacing: On Being Black and Feminist in South Africa, edited by Desiree Lewis and Gabeba Baderoon. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2021.
by Mardiya Siba Yahaya Writing the Self, Re-telling and Positioning Surfacing is an anthology that unravels, expands and rebuilds feminist practices as we know them.The book highlights the realities and thoughts of South African feminists and actively makes use of “writing the self” (Baderoon 2015) as a literary tool, but is not limited to it….
Wangari Maathai, by Tabitha Kanogo. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2020
-by Patricia Kameri-Mbote Reviewing this book is an honour for me.The subject –Wangari Maathai – is a woman I knew personally and admired greatly. She and I shared a cup of tea and buns at an international symposium that she had officially opened as an Assistant Minister for environment law on the morning of the…