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How did African women negotiate the complex political, economic, and social forces of colonialism in their daily lives? How did they make meaningful lives for themselves in a world that challenged fundamental notions of work, sexuality, marriage, motherhood, and family? By considering the lives of ordinary African women -- farmers, queen mothers, midwives, urban dwellers, migrants, and political leaders -- in the context of particular colonial conditions at specific places and times, Women in African Colonial Histories challenges the notion of a homogeneous "African women's experience." While recognizing the inherent violence and brutality of the colonial encounter, the essays in this lively volume show that African women were not simply the hapless victims of European political rule. Innovative use of primary sources, including life histories, oral narratives, court cases, newspapers, colonial archives, and physical evidence, attests that African women's experiences defy static representation. Readers at all levels will find this an important contribution to ongoing debates in African women's history and African colonial history.
Focusing on conjugal production and reproduction in colonial Asante, this text seeks to understand how broader social and economic factors - cash cropping, trade, monetization of the economy, British rule and Christian missions - recast the terms of domestic struggle and how ordinary men and women negotiated an ever-shifting landscape. By centring their analysis on Asante women, the authors provide building blocks for constructing a broader social history of a society whose past has largely been understood in terms of the state, political evolution, trade, and the careers of political elites.
A collection of essays honouring African scholar Ivor Wilks.
The eleven-year civil war in Sierra Leone from 1991 to 2002 was incomprehensibly brutal—it is estimated that half of all female refugees were raped and many thousands were killed. While the publicity surrounding sexual violence helped to create a general picture of women and girls as victims of the conflict, there has been little effort to understand female soldiers’ involvement in, and experience of, the conflict. Female Soldiers in Sierra Leone draws on interviews with 75 former female soldiers and over 20 local experts, providing a rare perspective on both the civil war and post-conflict development efforts in the country. Megan MacKenzie argues that post-conflict reconstruction is a highly gendered process, demonstrating that a clear recognition and understanding of the roles and experiences of female soldiers are central to both understanding the conflict and to crafting effective policy for the future.
While imperial blockbusters fly off the shelves, there is no comprehensive history dedicated to resistance in the 19th and 20th century British Empire. The Trouble with Empire is the first volume to fill this gap, offering a brief but thorough introduction to the nature and consequences of resistance to British imperialism. Historian Antoinette Burton's study spans the 19th and 20th centuries, when discontented subjects of empire made their unhappiness felt from Ireland to Canada to India to Africa to Australasia, in direct response to incursions of military might and imperial capitalism. The Trouble with Empire offers the first thoroughgoing account of what British imperialism looked like from below and of how tenuous its hold on alien populations was throughout its long, unstable life. By taking the long view, moving across a variety of geopolitical sites and spanning the whole of the period 1840-1955, Burton examines the commonalities between different forms of resistance and unveils the structural weaknesses of the British Empire.0.
Between 1870 and 1945, advances in communication and transportation simultaneously expanded and shrank the world. In five interpretive essays, A World Connecting goes beyond nations, empires, and world wars to capture the era’s defining feature: the profound and disruptive shift toward an ever more rapidly integrating world.
Introduction. Funeral culture: dignity, work, and cultural change -- Reckoning life: dying from AIDS to living with HIV -- Religious healing and resurrection: "Faith without work is dead"--The secrets of life insurance: saving, care, and the witch -- Grounded: body politics of burial and cremation -- Life in a takeaway box: mobility and purity in funeral feasts -- Commemoration and cultural change: memento radicalis -- Conclusion. The afterlives of work
Drawing on Foucault's analysis of disciplinary power and Gramsci's theories on hegemony, Laura J. Dull argues in this insightful volume that Ghanian teachers' diverse roles-as moral disciplinarians, ambivalent partners with global donors and lenders, romantic racialists of Africans-illustrate the ways in which educators deploy history and nationalism as strategies of power in support of, but also in opposition to, dominant systems. On the one hand, by enforcing strict morality, 'modern' attitudes and hard work in schools, teachers appear to consent to the hegemonic terms for development that their leaders have adopted: neo-liberal economics and liberal democracy, Christian morals and work et...
This book makes the case for an urgent praxis of critical spatial literacy for African women. It provides a critical analysis of how Asante women negotiate and understand the politics of contemporary space in Accra and beyond and the effect it has on their lives, demonstrating how they critically 'read that world.'
This fully updated new edition of Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective carefully introduces and responds to changes in anthropological approaches to and perspectives on gender. With two new editors and new authors from the Global South and underrepresented communities, it combines theoretically and ethnographically based chapters to examine gender roles and ideology around the world. The books is divided thematically into five parts, with the editors opening each section with a succinct introduction to the principal issues. The book retains some of the classic chapters while offering new contributions and extended discussions throughout on methodology. It also has entirely new contributions ...