Feminist and Pan Africanist Literature
Publishing Africa: Decolonial Strategies and Feminist Methodologies
This promises to be an exciting discussion, as it brings together a panel of great minds with extensive knowledge and experiences in publishing drawn from across the continent. Presenters will share insights and new ideas that emerge from the many efforts that have been directed at liberating African publishing from colonial and male-dominated hegemonies in global knowledge production.
Revolutionizing the Child – Literature for the Next Generation
“Educate a man and you educate a man, educate a woman and you educate the next generation” This panel explores the role and possibilities of children’s literature for bringing about more just and equitable societies that have been imagined since the dawn of African liberation movements. What attitudes and values do contemporary authors seek to convey in their work, and that the colonial and masculinist narratives are being so widely challenged by movements all over the African world?
Left Feminist Biographies
Following the screening of biograhical documentaries on Lorraine Hansberry and Ama Ata Aidoo, this panel brings together several of the worlds most accomplished feminist biographiers to discuss the lessons that we can draw from the lives and experiences of some of the worlds most revolutionary African women, Claudia Jones, Eslanda Robeson, and Suzanne Césaire, Jeanne Nardal, Aoua Kéita, Andrée Blouin the revolutionary couple, Walter and Albertina Sisulu. African feminist biographers and filmakers worldwide are redressing the systematic erasure of African women in the past and in the present (hint: watch out for the 2022 Issue of IJAHS on AFrican Feminist History at: https://www.bu.edu/africa/publications/ijahs/)
African Cinematic Resistance to Western Hegemony
Since inception, Africa’s independent film industry has overturned colonial and racial capitalist distortion of Africa, Africans and African relations of gender and sexuality.
Interview with Bernadine Evaristo
Nigerian-British author Bernardine Evaristo, the first African to win the the Booker prize for fiction, joins Abena Busia on live zoom to discuss her life and work, and to share the thinking that led her to write her powerful and urgent “Manifesto: On never giving up”(2021), following the success of her remarkable novel about the Black British experience : “Girl, Woman, Other” (2019)
Gender and Women’s Studies as Feminist Strategy
“In the early 1990s only 4% of Africa’s professoriate were women, and while this number has steadily increased, especially in administrative appointments, there are still few women in top research professorships. Feminist academics have established gender and women’s studies programs, training thousands of women and men better able to challenge masculine domination in policy, govenance, culture and social relations. The heads of CEGENSA (Ghana), CEGRAD (Cape Coast), WORDOC (Ibadan) and the Makerere School of Women and Gender studies discuss the importance of these structures. The conversation will be moderated by renowned veteran sociologist from University of Zimbabwe, Prof Rudo Gaidzanwa.
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Dialogue on Gender and Sexuality in African Futurism
“How does the African Futurist genre (re)imagine gender norms, sexual identities, and issues of feminism on the continent? The contributors to a forthcoming issue of Feminsit Africa will explore questions of gender and sexuality in
“African Futurism,” a term that has gained currency since Nigerian-American novelist Nnedi Okorafor used it in a November 2018 Twitter post. Discussants explore how African Futurism has become a locally rooted cultural genre exploring how ideas about gender and sexuality in African cultures, traverse and transcend time and space. This session holds on the September 23rd at the Hannah Kudjoe Stage, with Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué as moderator, joined by Jenna N. Hanchey, Godfried Asante, and Arit Oku.”