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The terms 'creole' and 'creolization' have witnessed a number of significant semantic changes in the course of their history. Originating in the vocabulary associated with colonial expansion in the Americas it had been successively narrowed down to the field of black American culture or of particular linguistic phenomena. Recently 'creole' has expanded again to cover the broad area of cultural contact and transformation characterizing the processes of globalization initiated by the colonial migrations of past centuries. The present volume is intended to illustrate these various stages either by historical and/or theoretical discussion of the concept or through selected case studies. The auth...
U.S. Foreign Policy and Muslim Women's Human Rights explores the integration of American concerns about women's human rights into U.S. policy toward Islamic countries since 1979, reframing U.S.-Islamic relations and challenging assumptions about the drivers of American foreign policy.
African Women Writing Resistance is the first transnational anthology to focus on women’s strategies of resistance to the challenges they face in Africa today. The anthology brings together personal narratives, testimony, interviews, short stories, poetry, performance scripts, folktales, and lyrics. Thematically organized, it presents women’s writing on such issues as intertribal and interethnic conflicts, the degradation of the environment, polygamy, domestic abuse, the controversial traditional practice of female genital cutting, Sharia law, intergenerational tensions, and emigration and exile. Contributors include internationally recognized authors and activists such as Wangari Maatha...
This book re-reads the last 60 years of Anglophone African women’s writing from a transnational and trans-historical feminist perspective, rather than postcolonial, from which these texts have been traditionally interpreted. Such a comparative frame throws into relief patterns across time and space that make it possible to situate this writing as an integral part of women’s literary history. Revisiting this literature in a comparative context with Western women writers since the 18th century, the author highlights how invocations of "tradition" have been used by patriarchy everywhere to subjugate women, the similarities between women’s struggles worldwide, and the feminist imagination ...
Female genital excision, or the ritual of cutting the external genitals of girls and women, is undoubtedly one of the most heavily and widely debated cultural traditions of our time. By looking at how writers of African descent have presented the practice in their literary work, Elisabeth Bekers shows how the debate on female genital excision evolved over the last four decades of the twentieth century, in response to changing attitudes about ethnicity, nationalism, colonialism, feminism, and human rights. Rising Anthills (the title refers to a Dogon myth) analyzes works in English, French, and Arabic by African and African American writers, both women and men, from different parts of the Afr...
This book examines the political alliances that are built across the diaspora in contemporary plays written by Black women playwrights in the UK. Through the concept of creative diasporic solidarity, it offers an innovative theoretical approach to examine the ways in which the playwrights respond creatively to the violence and marginalisation of Black communities, especially Black women. This study demonstrates that theatre can act as a productive space for the ethical encounter with the Other (understood in terms of alterity, as someone different from the self) by examining the possibilities of these plays to activate the spectators’ responsibility and solidarity towards different types o...
Transgression(s) in Twenty-First-Century Women's Writing in French analyses the literary transgressions of women’s writing in French since the turn of the twenty-first century in the works of major figures, such as Annie Ernaux and Véronique Tadjo, of the now established writers of the ‘nouvelle génération’, such as Marie Darrieussecq and Virginie Despentes, and in some of the most exciting and innovative authors from across the francosphère, from Nine Antico to Maïssa Bey and Chloé Delaume. Pushing the boundaries of current thinking about normative and queer identities, local and global communities, family and kinship structures, bodies and sexualities, creativity and the litera...
Mediating Violence from Africa explores how African and non-African Francophone authors, filmmakers, editors, and scholars have packaged, interpreted, and filmed the violent histories of post–Cold War Francophone Africa. This violence, much of which unfolded in front of Western television cameras, included the use of child soldiers facilitated by the Soviet Union’s castoff Kalashnikov rifles, the rise of Islamist terrorism in West Africa, and the horrific genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Through close readings of fictionalized child-soldier narratives, cinematic representations of Islamist militants, genocide survivor testimony, and Western scholarship, George S. MacLeod analyzes th...
Drawing on the ever contentious and antagonistic relationship between the writer and the state, especially in the postcolony, the chapters assembled in this collection delineate Bill F. Ndi, the poet and playwright’s arduous and sometimes dangerous role as a custodian or guardian of the socioeconomics and politico-cultures of the Cameroonian postcolony and Africa at large. The chapters insist that granted The Cameroons’ quadruple experience of colonialism (through the Germans, the French, the British and La République du Cameroun), Cameroun and British Southern Cameroons’ history needs to purge itself of the epistemic and ontological violence of Francophonecentric historiography. “B...
This book is an opportune warning that alienation, estrangement and intentional diminishment serve as a cancer upon those who disburse it. The outsider suffers by being alone; the insider suffers even more by being forever known as a hypocrite who perpetuates dystopia. It uses literature as a hothouse for poisonous potted plants, the workings of a mind in turmoil and the exploration of a society or societies that seems to derive pleasure from others' ruin. Fears, Doubts, and Joy of Not Belonging considers themes that are biblical in scope from different societies and historical epochs. It is a sobering spiritual enlightenment of a child's "silent treatment" in adult form. The text complement...