Feminist Knowledge | Review Essay: African Feminist Studies: 1980-2002

Literary and Cultural Studies

These fields are significant areas for a range of disciplines. This is particularly true when we consider that African women's testimonies and subjectivities have been muffled both by white-centred feminism and by male-centred nationalism. In many cases, cultural expression, especially written fiction and orature, (which are conventionally areas where African women's creativity has been encouraged and has therefore flourished) provide cultural moments for the articulation of African women's voices on a range of personal, collective and historical concerns.

It is also significant that literature and artistic production cut across disciplines and offer insights into psychology, history, anthropology and both macro- and micro-level processes. Reducing the creativity and fiction of African women to testimony of social experiences, however, reinforces stereotypes about the inevitably mimetic or autobiographical forms of African women's creativity. As past and present criticism has shown, much writing develops innovative textual and narrative strategies, experiments with genres and forms, and reveals complex efforts to transcend inherited forms and styles.

The multidisciplinary relevance of literary studies is evidenced when we consider the centrality of ideology and cultural myths to the maintenance of gender relations. Feminists have long argued that gender ideology and hegemonic patriarchal beliefs play crucial roles in reproducing women's oppression. Literary works and criticisms thereof provide important insights into culture, belief systems and ideology, levels at which women's oppression is insidiously perpetuated. Studies of male writers' representations of women and gender are extremely suggestive here. Notable early examples include Rudo Gaidzanwa's Images of Women in Zimbabwean Literature (1985), Senkoro's The Prostitute in African Literature (1982) and Mona Mikhail's Images of Arab Women (1979).

Another reason why literary studies has general implications for women's studies in Africa is that both women's writing and its criticism offer discourses for consolidating theory in suggestive ways. Literary critics like Chikwenye Ogunyemi, Molara Ogundipe-Leslie, Catherine Acholonu, Obioma Nnaemeka, Carol Boyce Davies and Ann McClintock have all developed significant theoretical reflections on feminisms in Africa. In a global context, much feminist theorising, ranging from Julia Kristeva's to Gayatri Spivak's, takes its impetus from literary texts and criticism. We could speculate here that fiction often uncovers the insights into subjectivity, consciousnesses, key life experiences and trajectories of struggle that are central to theorising social experiences and identity. Even if we accept the extent to which fictional production may encourage more intricate unravelling of different and contradictory levels of experience, it remains intriguing that feminist literary theorists in Africa have developed work as broad theoretical interventions to a far greater degree than those in the social sciences.

A key reason for this seems to concern the extent to which African studies in general, and African gender studies in particular, have become increasingly balkanised and technocratic, with assumptions about relevant and politically grounded research focusing not on careful understanding of identities, relationships and social processes, but on clear cut "issues", with a view to practical, applied and immediate ways of addressing them. In the context of such factors as declining funding for universities and the increasing difficulties that many African academics encounter with large teaching loads for very poor pay, more and more have pursued intellectual work in contexts - ranging from the state, NGOs and business and commerce - that demand instrumentalist and narrowly issue-oriented approaches to intellectual work. As opposed to the study of politics, the economy or organisations, the study of fiction cannot easily be yoked to a sense of clear-cut "problems" or "issues" in the workplace, within the state or in various sectors in civil society. It therefore explicitly offers scope for exploration of social processes that a dominant academic culture in Africa, balkanised by instrumentalist agendas, national economic contingencies and dwindling support for rigorous intellectual work in universities, seems to be steadily eroding.

1. Literary Studies in the Broader Context of the Humanities

Criticism of African women's literature has flourished for several decades, although it does not, of course, have as long and strong a tradition as criticism of African male writers. It was really in the eighties that critics, responding to the women writers who began to publish at the time, began to focus specifically on the distinctive narrative strategies, styles and themes of African women writers. The first wave of criticism tends to be archival and effusive. This is largely part of an agenda to validate African women's hitherto suppressed cultural creativity. An example is Olade Taiwo's Female Novelists in Modern Africa (1984), which, like many other early studies, is prone to generalisation. Sweeping accounts of "the African woman writer" and "her" recurrent themes level the works of individual writers and also underplay regional trends and patterns within genres. At the same time, these generalisations usefully introduce women's studies and feminist researchers to a corpus of writing requiring distinct critical approaches and awareness of very particular cultural contexts.

Much critical work produced from the late eighties is significant for its focus on textual detail and its engagement with a range of analytical and theoretical models. These generate not only complex textual analysis, but also suggestive explorations of subjectivity in relation to cultural and social processes. Important studies here are essays anthologised in Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature (Davies and Graves, 1989) and Motherlands: Black Women's Writing from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia (Nasta, 1991). A further body of pioneering work deals with black women writers globally. Produced mainly by African-American feminists, this work highlights diasporic connections between black women's cultural and creative struggles in a range of contexts (see Lionnet, 1993 and Kibera, 1991).

Apart from Bessie Head, well-known and long-established African women writers including Buchi Emecheta, Flora Nwapa and Ama Ata Aidoo have not yet become the focus of book-length studies, even though a variety of important essays have appeared in journals and anthologies. Two important recent publications, however, deal with Tsitsi Dangarembga and Yvonne Vera respectively: Emerging Perspectives on Tsitsi Dangarembga: Negotiating the Postcolonial, edited by Ann Willey and Jeanette Treiber (2002) and Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera, edited by Robert Muponde and Mandi Taruvinga (2002). As international interest in these writers grows, it is likely that so will the readers of these critical studies together with publishers' interest in new critical works. Like the more general studies, studies of individual authors fall into two categories: works motivated by a concern with validating "new" writing; and works that deal intricately with writers' texts. Engaging about the writers, the latter also explore contexts, traditions and cultural trajectories of relevance to all women's studies and feminist scholars.

One of the most important themes raised within literary studies concerns women's writing as path-breaking yet often neglected theorising of experience. A disturbing legacy of African women's othering has been the pigeonholing of their cultural production as expressive and "purely" autobiographical. Apart from the fallacy that art can ever not be partially autobiographical, this perception denies the interpretive and intellectual force of African women's creativity. The voluminous scholarship in this field demonstrates that women writers have dealt intricately with the everyday lived experience and daily struggles around which African feminism needs to be articulated. In particular, they have shed light on the complex intersection between being situated in oppressive subject positions and struggles to find freedoms beyond oppressive locations.

A recent study by Susan Arndt, The Dynamics of African Feminism: Defining and Classifying African-Feminist Literatures (2001) is an especially comprehensive exploration of African women writers' contributions to philosophical thought and theory. Regional orientations are Almeida's study of Francophone writers translated into English and especially the work of Mariama Ba in her Francophone African Women Writers: Destroying the Emptiness of Silence (1994) and Hitchcott's Women Writers in Francophone Africa (2000). By examining voice in relation both to authors and characters, Almeida and Hitchcott examine the confluence of Islam, patriarchy and colonialism in shaping distinct trajectories of resistance for certain women. The strengths of these studies over Arndt's are evident in the attention to the particularised circumstances and intersecting details that shape African gendered experiences. However, Arndt's work is of tremendous strategic value in view of assumptions about the "expressive" orientation of African women's writing.

Feminist critics of African women writers are also sharply attuned to gendering as social process. As indicated in studies like Henderson's "Beyond Streetwalking: The Woman of the City as Urban Pioneer" (1999), Kalu's Women, Literature and Development in Africa (2001) and Kolawole's "Self Representation and the Dynamics of Culture and Power in African Women's Writing" (1999), gender is irreducibly threaded into different social processes, with writers' attention to the intricacy of their character's experiences describing socially-important facets of emotional and public life that are often neglected or obscured in social science research. By conveying the fluidity and texture of lived experiences, fiction is often liberated to explore interstices within the subjects and theoretical apparatus of academic disciplines. Among the many notable themes in critics' exploration of fictionalised processes, three warrant particular attention here. These are the representation of women in male-authored texts, explorations of gender and nation and the treatment of motherhood.

In readings of men's views of women, critics have turned to writers including Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Sembene Ousmane and Ngugi wa Thiongo to explore the distinct ways in which African women have been stereotyped. Essays anthologised in Ngambika (1986) include Merini's "Women in Man's Exploration of His Country, His World", Davies' "Maidens, Mistresses and Matrons: Feminine Images in Selected Soyinka Works", Busia's "Parasite and Prophets: The Use of Women in Ayi Kwei Armah's Novels" and Nama's "Daughters of Moombbi: Ngugi's Heroines and Traditional Gikuyu Aesthetics". All contribute to understanding how women have been represented in the masculine aesthetics and political agendas implicit in pre-colonial myths, colonial encounters, nationalist agendas and post-colonial processes. These studies uncover a significantly different range of images from the stereotypes of women as mothers, virgins or whores uncovered by early western feminists. Analysis of these images is consequently important in considering the roots and forms of "femininities" in differing African contexts. Inevitably, they indicate that constructions of femininity are important to definitions of masculinity, with male writers' projections of their women characters revealing a great deal about men's desires and locations. They also indicate how complicatedly gendered representation is linked to subjectivity. While women authors have often challenged men's representations, critics like Kibera and Boehmer show how hegemonic representation, articulated by both men and women authors, shape Africa's aesthetic and cultural landscape.

Another theme, highlighting gender in relation to nationalism, has been central to many critical explorations. Here work has dovetailed importantly with studies of cultural history. A scholar like Susan Andrade (1996) therefore draws on the sociological and historical work of Nancy Hunt and Marcia Wright to examine women's fiction as interrogating or unsettling gendered subtexts in nationalist discourses. Historians' and anthropologists' shift towards cultural history and a different vocabulary has also fostered increasingly close exchanges between literary and historical or anthropological explorations of representation, cultural construction and narrative. This is well-illustrated in a recent issue of the Canadian Journal of African Studies entitled "Wayward Wives, Misfit Mothers and Disobedient Daughters," which has been republished as a book edited by anthropologists, Dorothy Hodgson and Sheryl McCurdy (2001). Essays like Nakanyike Musisi's "Taking Spaces/Making Spaces; Gender and the Cultural Construction of 'Bad Women' in the Development of Kampala-Kibuga, 1900-1962" (2001) Margot Lovett's "'She Thinks She's Like a Man': Marriage and (De)construction Gender Identity in Colonial Buha, Western Tanzania, 1943-1960 " (2001), Margot Lovett's "Confronting Authority; Dancing Women and Colonial Men: The Nwaobiala of 1925 " (2001) and Misty Bastian's "Rounding up Spinsters: Gender Chaos and Unmarried Women in Colonial Asante " (2001) develop detailed readings of identities, behaviours and social processes as texts whose complexity requires that they be intricately unravelled, rather than simply categorised in terms of the two-dimensional formulae (such as "reactionary" conservative" or progressive) so often used by sociologists and historians.

A third important theme in scholars' interpretation of fictional explorations revolves on mothering. As is the case with studies of male writers' representations, this oeuvre of criticism has contributed enormously to discussions of gendered identity. Mothering for African women, both in terms of their social roles and their symbolic representation, has often been central to women's gendered experiences and cultural location. The centrality of social and conceptual motherhood for African women is intricately explored in Motherlands, a collection edited by Susheila Nasta (1991); and, more recently Nnaemeka's edited collection, The Politics of (M)othering: Womanhood, Identity, and Resistance in African Literature (1997). In the studies of diasporic African women's writing in these key anthologies, a range of critics bring different political perspectives to bear on their reading of women authors' concerns and of identity and social experiences. Ranging from hegemonic representations of women as mothers to women writers' intricate disentangling and redefinition of mothering roles and identities, contributions to these collections unravel the contours and histories of the looming mother motif in African femininities.

Overall, therefore, feminist studies of women's writing have the potential to expand work in some of the key growth areas for African women's studies. In defining the breadth of the terrain that can be uncovered by literary studies and its potential to open up for scrutiny hidden facets of our lives, Amina Mama's appraisal of cultural studies is very suggestive:

Cultural studies can facilitate a more active engagement with both history and the present, and so contribute to social transformation. The task faced involves removing the veils which centuries of marginalisation have drawn over our visions of ourselves, our histories and our future, veils which we have grown so accustomed to that we wear them willingly, like guests attending a masquerade. (1997:79).

2. The Impact of Post-Structuralist and Post-Colonial Criticism

Post-structuralist and post-colonial feminist readings of African women's writing have made considerable headway since the eighties. They have been especially pronounced in analysis of diasporic women's writing like Lionnet's impressive readings of writers from the United States, South Africa, Nigeria and the Caribbean (1993). Lionnet's study yields rich insights into identity, personality, the psyche and the interpersonal relationships with which writers deal. Her post-structuralist and post-colonial strategies interrogate many of the givens of human experience.

By subjecting to scrutiny many of the concepts that we have traditionally used to "reflect" life and stressing that these concepts complicatedly create our worlds, post-structuralist and post-colonial analysis allows us to explore connections between meanings, concepts and power in very liberating ways. Attention to the politics of representation is especially important in exploring African women as subjects who have long borne the meanings of others' interpretations. Here it is significant that hegemonic representations are not necessarily overtly sexist or racist. Dominant representation, shaped by relations and structures that have contributed to African women's oppression, often covertly infiltrate the models we turn to, the scholarly work on which we draw, the traditions we aspire to, and the codes we adopt. Deconstructive analysis can help us to clear the air and so allow us to interrogate our own locations in oppressive systems of representation.

Deconstructive post-colonial criticism can vastly contribute to explorations of African women's subjectivity and to our efforts to discover new personal and social freedoms. This is especially important in the context of the masculinist landscape that has dominated many "revolutionary" perceptions of African identities. As Kwame Appiah (1992) has so persuasively shown, the history of philosophies that have driven nationalism and post-colonial nation-building are traceable not only to a revolutionary impulse but also to conservative colonial and developmentalist discourses. Compounding this conservative orientation is a patriarchal emphasis associated with the men who pioneered cultural nationalism on the continent and with such ideologies as Negritude and Black Consciousness. In the framework of this patriarchal emphasis, women are frequently figured simply as the mothers of the nation, as those who support men's struggles and psyches, and as symbolic markers of racial and national frontiers.

Deconstructive readings that explore this legacy therefore question a long history of public discourses of freedom, identity and cultural transformation in Africa, with critics' readings of women's fiction directly feeding into different agendas for conceptualising African freedoms, African identities and Africa's cultural transformation. Kalu's Women, Literature and Development in Africa (2001), as well as essays anthologised in a collection edited by Kolawole, Gender Perceptions and Development in Africa (1998) and in Nnaemeka's The Politics of (M)othering: Womanhood, Identity, and Resistance in African Literature (1997) are important examples of studies that seek, through women writers' concerns, to broaden African conceptual and philosophical frameworks of development, liberation and transformation.

A final word about current theoretical directions in literary studies concerns its role in shaping other disciplines. With the growing emphasis on representation, the body and sexuality among many sociologists, anthropologists and historians, it is noteworthy that a lexicon which is strongly rooted in literary criticism is being taken up to explore different forms of and approaches to human experience in increasingly enthusiastic ways. Many scholars are therefore underplaying, questioning or abandoning developmentalist and normative terms like production and reproduction and the cultural assumptions that they tend to inscribe. Overall, the borrowing from post-structuralist and post-colonial literary criticism has encouraged many scholars not only to explore new subjects, but also to develop a language that probes gendered experiences in hitherto unprecedented ways.

3. Reading Culture

An important growing field within cultural studies is the media and mass communications. Much advocacy work and research here falls into the trap of working within and endorsing functionalist and conservative approaches, whereby emphasis is placed mainly on the quantitative growth of media ranging from newspapers and radio to television and the Internet, and assuming that the expansion of these will spontaneously contribute to "development". When this assumption is filtered through a "gender lens", it often simply means emphasising women's inclusion in mainstream communication processes, rather than subjecting these processes to a radical critique in terms of their elitist, capitalist, globalising and heavily gender-biased foundations.

Recent advocacy work and research on the continent evidences a growing sophistication and incisiveness in terms of the ways in which patriarchal media institutions are interrogated, gendered media representations are contested and alternative feminist forms are explored. The Know-How conference, held in Kampala from 23-27 July in 2002 has been an important occasion for demonstrating African women's empowerment in male-dominated spaces of mass communications. This is propitious at a stage when, even though women's organisations and civil society movements are working hard to eradicate gender oppression, entrenched gender biases in newspapers, magazines, radio, television and websites pervade public and private life and profoundly shape men's and women's sense of what their legitimate gendered places in the world are.

An exciting example of accessible and practically-oriented work on gender is Whose News? Whose Views? (2001), edited by Colleen Lowe-Morna. Based on papers presented at the Southern Africa Gender in Media Handbook workshop from 21-24 February 2001, the book includes analysis, statistical studies and proposals offered by a range of media practitioners, analysts and gender activists, with chapters exploring three pivotal areas in gender and the media: the gendering of media institutions, gendered media representations, and strategies for gender-sensitive practices and forms. Similar studies aimed at training and practical support have been produced by the Uganda Media Women's Association and include With Women in Mind: Towards a Fair Mass Media in Uganda (1998) and Use of the Mass Media: Tips for Women Leaders (1998). Publications such as these are especially relevant when we consider how deeply masculinist and often misogynistic media institutions are, and how - as many statistics reveal - the growing numbers of African women entering the industry rarely reach senior managerial or executive positions and often feel pressured to resign (see for example, the Federation of African Media Women's, "Gender Employment Patterns in Media Organisations in the Southern Africa Region", 1999).

More scholarly contributions have also been produced in recent years, and include Ruth Mukama's comprehensive "Women Making a Difference in the Media" (2002). Although this study focuses on Uganda, it offers a theoretical and methodological framework, as well as comparative empirical evidence, that have general relevance for work on the continent. The development of this work is well-illustrated in papers presented at the Know-How Conference, as well as the Women's Worlds Congress, both held in Kampala in mid-2002. The prominence of African gender scholars working in this area indicates how concertedly they are challenging the corrosive impact of recent mass communications developments on our gendered cultural landscape and proactively responding to the global oligarchies, autocratic states and male elites who have worked to control the content and flow of media information.

For a number of years, challenges to these patterns have also come from the alternative media ventures driven by women in Africa. The oldest of these is the Uganda Media Women's Association, which was formed in 1983 and has been pursuing a two-fold strategy of monitoring mainstream media and driving alternatives. At a continental level, the African Women's Media Centre was established in 1997 to provide training and networking opportunities for women as junior or middle-level media workers, producers, managers, executives and media experts.

In other strands within the field of cultural studies, important work has appeared since the start of the nineties. Although women's studies generally tends to straddle disciplines, it is significant that the crossing of boundaries with cultural studies can, as bell hooks provocatively puts it, encourage us to "take another look, to contest, to interrogate, and in some cases to recover and redeem" (hooks, 1994:5). A refreshing example of the crossing of disciplinary and subject borders to develop fresh insights is Beth Baron's The Women's Awakening in Egypt (1994). Based on four years of research, the book examines Arab women's literacy and cultural creativity vis-à-vis gender and class dynamics to generate perceptive analysis of Arab women's movements and participation in different public spheres. It is an impressive example of the breadth and insight that feminist-oriented cultural studies can offer.

In view of the proliferation of women's creativity in areas previously controlled by men, interpretive studies of women in domains like cinema, music and the visual arts are an important growth area. Studies that signal attention to new patterns of creativity include the collection edited by Baird, Eye to Eye, Women: Their Words and Worlds: Life in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean as Seen in Photographs and in Fiction By the Region's Top Women Writers (1996) and Gwendolyn Foster's Women Filmmakers of the African and Asia Diaspora: Decolonizing the Gaze, Locating Subjectivity (1997). Nzegwu (1998, 2000) has produced suggestive readings both of women's interventions into contemporary African cultural production and of gendered meanings and hierarchies in recent African art and culture.

A special issue of Matatu, Journal for African Culture and Society, on African women and film, edited by Kenneth Harrow (1997) makes considerable inroads both in terms of identifying new energies in the male-dominated and commercialised cinema industry as well as exciting interpretations of the politics of visual representation. The collection embraces: readings of images of women and gender stereotyping in such articles as Suzanne Macrae's "The Mature and Older Women of African Film" (1997), Beti Ellerson's "The Female Body as Symbol of Change and Dichotomy: Conflicting Paradigms in the Representation of Women in African Film" (1997) and J Nwachukuwu-Agbada's "Women in Igbo Language Films: The Virtuous and the Villainous" (1997). The book also includes explorations of ways in which dominant discourses shape subjectivities and portrayals both in cinematic representation and viewing in Ratiba Hadj-Moussa's "The Locus of Tension: Gender in Algerian Cinema" (1997) and William Vincent's "The Unreal but Visible Line: Difference and Desire for the Other in Chocolat"(1997). Lastly, it provides archival information about current film-making patterns in Nancy Schmidt's "Sub-Saharan African Women Filmmakers: Agendas for Research" (1997).

But apart from opening up inquiries into creativity and cultural production, cultural studies encourages attention to the everyday, the ordinary and the seemingly insignificant. Mama observes, in relation to gender and colonialism, that "gender analysis of cultural changes takes us beyond the most immediate and visible levels of might and conquest" (1997: 69), presenting a case for examining culture, broadly encompassing all socially-inflected exchanges and mediations, as sites for localised struggles and transformations.

Much work remains to be done here, although important ventures into the field have occurred in a collection edited by Karin Barber's, Readings in African Popular Culture (1997), which contains a section on women in popular culture. Linnerbuhr's "Kanga: Popular Cloth With Messages" (1997) reads women's wearing of kanga cloth as communication. Focusing on the value of writing in African contexts with high levels of illiteracy, she shows how Kenyan peasant and working women seek authority in a print world dominated by men and elites. Her overall point is that the wearing of kanga cloth, and especially the display of its textual messages, provide opportunities for women to communicate in public realms. Linnerbuhr consequently sheds light on how symbolic forms of political expression indicate the use of available signifiers to unsettle subordination or silencing. Such studies of women's voice have the potential to expand the "resistance" models that can often constrain and pigeonhole understandings of women's agency as political and historical actors. In particular, attention to practices like dress, cooking or hairstyling can open up ostensibly self-evident or neutral forms of women's lives as fertile forms of self-expression, cultural creativity and political rebellion. Marking a departure from scholarship's familiar subjects, these activities can uncover many interesting studies for anthropologists.

A different kind approach to cultural signification is Miki Flockemann's "Watching Soap Opera" (2000), a study focusing on gender in relation to an American form that has become very visible in South Africa and other parts of the continent. Exploring the example of a South African woman playwright who introduces soap opera viewing into her play, Flockemann shows how the genre functions as an arena allowing viewers, especially black women, to critically engage with masculine and neo-imperialist meanings and so define their own identities and cultural agendas. Flockemann's examination of women's critical and active reading of conventional forms is echoed in Jane Bryce's "African Popular Fiction" (1997), an analysis of women as subjects in and readers of romance fiction. Showing that romance is not a static or straightforwardly masculine or western-centric form, Bryce considers the distinct themes, reading practices, and social relations that revolve around the popular romance genre in Kenya.

While Western romance formulae tend to present women as passively awaiting deliverance, Kenya's thriving tradition of romantic fiction from the seventies tells stories of assertive and independent women. Moreover, reading of romance fiction can often encourage readers, both men and women, to critically interrogate their worlds, with romance encoding tropes of change and desire that have both personal and social implications. This view is reflected in Bryce and Dako's "Textual Deviancy and Cultural Syncretism: Romantic Fiction as a Subversive Strain in Black Women's Writing" (2000). The article suggestively explores a genre, often considered to centre around male agency and eurocentric norms, that has been redefined by African women. Cultural studies scholars' growing emphasis on African women's redefinition or recreation of the meanings of mass or hegemonic culture are optimistic appraisals of how African women have responded subversively to dominant culture. Clearly, the growing invasiveness of neo-imperial, commercial and especially mass American culture in Africa demands ongoing critical scrutiny. It has been demonstrated, however, that African women, far from being passive consumers of imported cultural values, have selected and reshaped cultural texts and practices to express their distinct concerns.

The emphasis within studies of popular culture has intersected with the aims of social history to create micro-level readings of women and gender in volatile and rapidly transforming social processes. Such readings are notable for their detail, their emphasis on complexities, and their use of suggestive methods and concepts to convey the minutiae of political expression, social relationships and processes of subject-formation. The consolidation of methods and reading strategies within cultural studies bodes well for cross-disciplinary work in which intellectual rigour combines with insight and sensitivity. This consolidation will help to overturn the overwhelming paradigm of "oppression" that marked early studies of African women through an emphasis on agency and vigorous political expression. Cultural studies is therefore contributing not only interesting new methodologies and concepts for work in the social sciences, but also helping to inaugurate an important paradigm shift.