Postcolonial Hauntologies African Womens Discourses Of The Female Body

Postcolonial Hauntologies is an interdisciplinary and comparative analysis of critical, literary, visual, and performance texts by women from different parts of Africa. While contemporary critical thought and feminist theory have largely integrated the sexual female body into their disciplines, colonial representations of African women’s sexuality “haunt” contemporary postcolonial African scholarship which—by maintaining a culture of avoidance about women’s sexuality—generates a discursive conscription that ultimately holds the female body hostage. Ayo A. Coly employs the concept of “hauntology” and “ghostly matters” to formulate an explicative framework in which to examine postcolonial silences surrounding the African female body as well as a theoretical framework for discerning the elusive and cautious presences of female sexuality in the texts of African women. In illuminating the pervasive silence about the sexual female body in postcolonial African scholarship, Postcolonial Hauntologies challenges hostile responses to critical and artistic voices that suggest the African female body represents sacred ideological-discursive ground on which one treads carefully, if at all. Coly demonstrates how “ghosts” from the colonial past are countered by discursive engagements with explicit representations of women’s sexuality and bodies that emphasize African women’s power and autonomy.

Postcolonial Hauntologies is an interdisciplinary and comparative analysis of critical, literary, visual, and performance texts by women from different parts of Africa. While contemporary critical thought and feminist theory have largely integrated the sexual female body into their disciplines, colonial representations of African women’s sexuality “haunt” contemporary postcolonial African scholarship which—by maintaining a culture of avoidance about women’s sexuality—generates a discursive conscription that ultimately holds the female body hostage. Ayo A. Coly employs the concept of “hauntology” and “ghostly matters” to formulate an explicative framework in which to examine postcolonial silences surrounding the African female body as well as a theoretical framework for discerning the elusive and cautious presences of female sexuality in the texts of African women. In illuminating the pervasive silence about the sexual female body in postcolonial African scholarship, Postcolonial Hauntologies challenges hostile responses to critical and artistic voices that suggest the African female body represents sacred ideological-discursive ground on which one treads carefully, if at all. Coly demonstrates how “ghosts” from the colonial past are countered by discursive engagements with explicit representations of women’s sexuality and bodies that emphasize African women’s power and autonomy.

Gender, Migration, and the Claims of Postcolonial Nationhood in Francophone Africa examines three major migrant women writers from Francophone Africa: Ken Bugul, Calixthe Beyala, and Fatou Diome. Coly studies what home means in the context of migration and how gender shapes the meaning of home. This is the first study to bring together migrant women from Francophone Africa. This is also the first study to offer a feminist critique of postnationalist discourses of home, specifically the application of postnationalism to the postcolonial context.

The Yoruba was one of the most important civilizations of sub-Saharan Africa. While the high quality and range of its artistic and material production have long been recognized, the art of the Yoruba has been judged primarily according to the standards and principles of Western aesthetics. In this book, which merges the methods of art history, archaeology, and anthropology, Rowland Abiodun offers new insights into Yoruba art and material culture by examining them within the context of the civilization's cultural norms and values and, above all, the Yoruba language. Abiodun draws on his fluency and prodigious knowledge of Yoruba culture and language to dramatically enrich our understanding of Yoruba civilization and its arts. The book includes a companion website with audio clips of the Yoruba language, helping the reader better grasp the integral connection between art and language in Yoruba culture.

In a gathering of griot traditions fusing storytelling, cultural history, and social and literary criticism, Put Your Hands on Your Hips and Act Like a Woman "re-members" and represents how women of the African diaspora have drawn on ancient traditions to record memory, history, and experience in performance. These women's songs and dances provide us with a wealth of polyphonic text that records their reflections on identity, imagination, and agency, providing a collective performed autobiography that complements the small body of pre-twentieth-century African and African American women's writing. Gale P. Jackson engages with a range of vibrant traditions to provide windows into multiple discourses as well as "new" and old paradigms for locating the history, philosophy, pedagogy, and theory embedded in a lineage of African diaspora performance and to articulate and address the postcolonial fragmentation of humanist thinking. In lyrically interdisciplinary movement, across herstories, geographies, and genres, cultural continuities, improvisation, and transformative action, Put Your Hands on Your Hips and Act Like a Woman offers a fresh perspective on familiar material and an expansion of our sources, reading, and vision of African diaspora, African American, and American literatures.

This edited collection presents the first critical and historical overview of photography in Portuguese colonial Africa to an English-speaking audience. Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860–1975 brings together sixteen scholars from interdisciplinary fields as varied as history, anthropology, art history, visual culture and museum studies, to consider some of the key aspects in the visual representation of the longest-lasting European colonial empire in the African continent. The chapters span over two centuries and cover five formerly colonial territories – Angola, Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe – deploying a range of methodologies to explore the multiple meanings and the contested uses of the photographic image across the realms of politics, science, culture and war. This book responds to a marked surge of international interest in the relationship between photography and colonialism, which has hitherto largely overlooked the Portuguese imperial context, by delivering the most recent scholarly findings to a broad readership.

The contributors explore modes of social and psychological experience, the constitution of the subject, and forms of subjection that shape the lives of Basque youth, Indonesian artists, members of nongovernmental HIV/AIDS programmes in China and Zaire, and psychiatrists and their patients in Morocco and Ireland.

How representations of land and landscape perform important metaphorical labor in African literatures

Since the second half of the twentieth century, there has been a commitment on the part of women writers and scholars to revise and rewrite the history and culture of colonial and post-colonial women. This collection intends to enter a forum of discussion in which the colonial past serves as a point of reference for the analysis of contemporary issues. This volume will examine topics of women’s identities and bodies through literary representations and historical accounts. In other words, the aim is to reconstruct women’s identities through the representations of their bodies in literature and to analyse women’s bodies historically as sites of abuse, discrimination and violence on the one hand, and of knowledge and cultural production on the other. The chapters of this book will contribute to the formation of a new representation of women through history and literature which fights traditional stereotypes in relation to their bodies and identities. Focusing on female bodies as maternal bodies, as repositories of history and memory, as sexual bodies, as healing bodies, as performative of gender, as black bodies, as migrant and hybrid bodies, as the objects of regulation and control, and as victims of sexual exploitation and murder, the different articles contained in this book will examine issues of space, power/knowledge relations, discrimination, the production of knowledge, gender and boundaries to produce new identities for women which contest and respond to the traditional ones. The volume is addressed to a wide readership, both scholars and those interested in investigating the dynamics of the female body, and the social and cultural conceptualizations of our multicultural and multiethnic contemporary societies in relation to it, without forgetting the historical and colonial roots of these new representations.

This Handbook provides in one volume rich, comprehensive and rigorous coverage of specific subject areas and thematic concerns in the ever-evolving academic discipline of African philosophy. This Handbook is unique in its focus on central and emerging areas within African philosophy such as Afro-communitarian philosophy, ethics, epistemology, social and political philosophy, existentialism, philosophy of religion, gender philosophy, philosophy of education, phenomenology, transhumanism, African philosophy futures, and philosophy of the non-human. The thirty-two chapters in this Handbook explore the rich textual and non-textual forms of philosophical knowledge in Africa and adequately represent the broad and diverse scope of African philosophy, showing the richness and depth of the philosophical tradition. This reference work is indispensable to students and researchers in African philosophy, comparative philosophy and world philosophies.