1,720,963 research outputs found
Some Words on Life, Girlhoods, and a Research Path through East and Central Africa
No full textWhat is girlhood? A status? A life stage? An identity? A historical fiction?
Throughout history, girls are often depicted either as perpetual victims to be saved or instigators to be blamed for social problems. Full of contradictions, girlhood is complicated. This talk explores the ways words can serve as artifacts that provide insight into the complex histories of girlhood in eastern and central Africa. Through an examination of historical evidence relevant to generation, girlhood, and family, this talk invites the audience to think through the historical possibilities of girlhoods from ancient to contemporary times.https://digitalcommons.bucknell.edu/fac_coll/1048/thumbnail.jp
Resilience in African History
Full text linkBetween 1960, when seventeen African countries gained independence from French colonial rule, and 2020, when the global pandemic of Covid-19 emerged, just over five hundred scholarly books or articles were published addressing, to varying degrees, resilience on the African continent. Working toward this special issue has made it clear that there continues to be a great deal of slippage in how scholars describe resilience. This concept is often conflated with terms such as “resistance,” “persistence,” and “endurance.” While these do express ways humans respond to adversity, they are distinct from resilience, which is rooted in adaptation not opposition.1 Some people choose counterviolence or confrontation as the path toward adaptation; however, resilience is not an exact synonym for those other terms. The definitional slippage may result from scholars perceiving resilience to be the inverse of vulnerability and the antidote to collapse or as an answer to the neoliberal need for individual responsibility
\u27Set Alight to Her Husband’s House\u27: Teaching as Scholarship and Activism in the Gambian Archives
No full textIntersections of Gender and (in)justice : Bibi Titi Mohamed and Women\u27s Struggles During and After Independence in Tanzania
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\u27Inspiring a revolution\u27: Women\u27s central role in Tanzanian institutions, independence and beyond
No full textCatherine Cymone FoursheyMarla L. Jaksch Critical readings of institutionalism reveal a disturbing, yet common pattern – a pattern in which women and their contributions – if they make it into the picture at all – are distorted and pushed to the margins. In-depth analyses of women’s political engagement in Africa continue to be limited and underdeveloped (Mulligan 1999; Yoon 2013, 2011) . Major scholarly works rarely address the gendered nature of political processes and political institutions; rather, they are androcentrically presented as normatively male. This persists despite a growing and rich feminist literature on women in the fields of history, sociology, development and politics. For the most part the scholarship examines aspects of women’s oppression and victimhood but rarely the consistent examples of women’s achievements and societal contributions evident in the Tanzanian context
Women in the Gambia
Full text linkA predominantly rural territory with few urban centers historically, the Gambia holds little in the way of well-known luxury resources commonly discussed in studies of western Africa. People of the region, in particular women, have exploited both riverine and oceanic food and material resources. The limited scholarship available on Gambian women reveals they have been essential to those endeavors contributing to economy, politics, society, and family institutions. Often by pursuing seemingly less-lucrative endeavors, women have been prominent actors innovating production and acquisition techniques as well as product uses in this mixed agricultural and aquatic economy, from precolonial to contemporary times. Despite few raw materials or luxury resources, and in certain contexts great limits on their authority, women of the Gambia River region were central to economic life historically, developing household food production and trading their surplus agricultural, aquatic, and manufactured goods. In different eras and contexts, Gambian women have been agricultural innovators and technologists; catchers, processors, and traders of aquatic resources; merchants of manufactured and crafted items; and educators. In essence, they created intellectual, economic, and artisanal opportunities for themselves and others in their communities. These activities allowed women to influence and propel economic and political agendas over time. In particular, women have been credited with critical developments in rice production technologies going back at least to the 16th century, though women’s expertise in this realm likely has much deeper historical roots. This knowledge and set of skills related to rice agriculture made Mandinka women of the Gambia River region critical to West Africa’s Upper Guinea coast and also to life in the Americas as enslaved producers. Mandinka women and men became a large demographic represented in southeastern US plantations and communities because of their well-developed techniques in rice cultivation. Gambian women significantly influenced the eastern and western Atlantic worlds.
The modern-day nation of The Gambia, which achieved independence in 1965, is a relatively small territory hugging the banks of Gambia River for a narrow fifteen miles from the north and south banks. Starting 300 miles inland to the east (upriver), the river flows west into the Atlantic Ocean (downriver). Looking back in time at this region bordering the river, it is important to consider Gambian women’s lives over time in the context of both centralized and non-centralized political units. In the orbit of centralized states such as Ghana (4th–13th centuries), Takrur (9th–14th centuries), Mali (13th–15th centuries), and Jolof (14th–16th centuries), women (and men) negotiated shifting expectations over time. Certainly Gambian women have been born into, circulated among, or married within several local cultural and linguistic traditions that include Aku, Bambara, Fula, Jola, Mandinka, Manjago, Serahulle, Serer, and Wollof. However, scholars have written more about women and gender for these groups in neighboring countries. Non-centralized political and social affiliations typically provided women a great deal of authority and autonomy. However, most positions and statuses women were privy to historically were reshaped and often greatly diminished from the 19th century onward due to processes of the slave trade, Islamization, and European colonialization. With the rise of Atlantic-world trade small numbers of coastal Gambian River women expanded their spheres of influence and wealth by forming both marital and economic alliances with Portuguese, French, Dutch, and British men. By the 20th century a number of women pursued various forms and levels of education in efforts to increase their opportunities in the social, political, and economic arenas. In essence, in each historical era women of the Gambia River have sought out knowledge, expertise, and skills in order to achieve their ambitions regardless of the political, religious, or social order dominant at the time
A Turn to the African Girl
Full text linkOver the last century, girls in Africa, long ignored as sources of knowledge, have, nevertheless, engaged vocally and publicly in activism and artistic endeavors to express their visions and aspirations for a future society inclusive of their needs. Only recently have scholars begun to examine the complicated nature of girlhood in relation to capacity, competence, and knowledge layered with vulnerability and inexperience. In the last decade, the flourishing of girls’ inventive acts of agency and their use of their own incisive voices have given impetus to the growing scholarship on girls’ vibrant historical and current political, economic, creative, and cultural pursuits
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