African Women Writing Resistance

An Anthology of Contemporary Voices

Edited by Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez , Pauline Dongala, Omotayo Jolaosho, Anne Serafin, £16.95, 360 pages.

Confronting entrenched social inequality and inadequate access to resources, women across Africa are working with determination and imagination to improve their material conditions and to blaze a clear path for their daughters and granddaughters. The thirty-one African-born contributors to this book move beyond the linked dichotomies of victim/oppressor and victim/heroine to present their experiences of resistance in full complexity: they are at the forward edge of the tide of women’s empowerment that, at the start of the twenty-first century, is moving across the African continent.

Contributions illuminate the effect on women of women’s poverty and lack of access to education, health care, credit, and political power; HIV/AIDS; female genital cutting; Sharia law; armed conflict and rape as a weapon of war; displacement and exile; women’s oppressions within heterosexual relationships; resistant sexualities; intergenerational conflict and tensions between tradition and modernity.

A FAHAMU BOOKS AND PAMBAZUKA PRESS PUBLICATION
Co-publisher University of Wisconsin Press

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