by Jamela Robertson While reading this monograph, one could not help but be taken back to relive experiences as a young woman living in different communities across South Africa. From the outset, the author stirs up memories of adolescent questions and confusions around whether one had free will, through which one made decisions and choices…
Category: Reviews
Beauty Diplomacy: Embodying an Emerging Nation, by Oluwakemi M. Balogun. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020.
by Sharon Adetutu Omotoso While reading this monograph, one could not help but be taken back to relive experiences as a young woman living in different communities across South Africa. From the outset, the author stirs up memories of adolescent questions and confusions around whether one had free will, through which one made decisions and…
Gender, Separatist Politics, and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon
by Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué While reading this monograph, one could not help but be taken back to relive experiences as a young woman living in different communities across South Africa. From the outset, the author stirs up memories of adolescent questions and confusions around whether one had free will, through which one made decisions and…
When the Light is Fire: Maasai Schoolgirls in Contemporary Kenya by Heather D. Switzer.
by Monique Kwachou As per the old English adage, “Do not look a gift horse in the mouth,”, we have been made to believe that questioning the value of something “intended for good” is wrong. Yet, a plethora of critiques of development theories and initiatives in the Global South suggest that, if not properly vetted,…
Fashioning Postfeminism: Spectacular Femininity and Transnational Culture by Simidele Dosekun
By Rosemary Oyinlola Popoola Fashioning Postfeminism: Spectacular Femininity and Transnational Culture seeks to recentre and challenge dominant narratives about postfeminism from the standpoint of often silenced and marginalized women of the Global South, specifically socio-economically privileged Nigerian women. Over many years, postfeminism has been framed as the exclusive preserve of White women and girls—with only…
Methodologies in Caribbean Research on Gender and Sexuality,by Kamala Kempadoo and Halimah A.F. DeShong(eds)
By Sylvia Tamale This compendium is a breath of fresh air for those frustrated with dominant narratives that feed into the (neo)colonial, Eurocentric and hetero-patriarchal projects. The authors engage in counter readings of conventional archives and produce knowledge from unconventional sources. What better way to decolonize knowledge production than theorizing gender and sexuality “from the…
“Liberation is Necessarily an Act of Culture”: A Review of Spirit Desire by Sokari Ekine
-by Luam Kidane In the middle of Spirit Desire, a photo book on Haitian Vodoun, you see Sokari Ekine, the photographer, for the first time. Standing in the waters of Sodo, Haiti, she is metaphysically encountering Haitian ancestors in the liminal space between Africa and Haiti, where Haiti is Africa and Africa is Haiti. In…
Negotiating Gender Equity in the Global South: The Politics of Domestic Violence Policy by Sohela Nazneen, Sam Hickey, Eleni Sifaki, eds.
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…
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…