Feminist Knowledge | Bibliography: African Women's Studies
This bibliography is one of the foundation resources of the African Gender Institute's “Strengthening Gender and Women's Studies in Africa for Social Transformation" Project. It comprises two parts and indexes material published between the periods 1980–1995 and 1996–2001. Charting influential developments and trajectories in feminist scholarship, the bibliography maps broad trends in research, identifies key growth areas and surveys connections between socio-political developments on the continent and feminist research and publications. It therefore contributes to the project's broad intention of mapping the coherence of scholarly work on women and gender in Africa, and of building capacity and resources for strengthening tertiary-level teaching and research.
Most importantly, it addresses an over-arching methodological and research preoccupation with current information technology to enhance research and dialogue among African feminist scholars, students and teachers. This bibliography consequently plays a part in the project's aim of helping to redress the relatively weak locations of feminist teachers and scholars in tertiary institutions and their limited research resources and tools. As a resource that will be made available on the Internet, it tries to bypass the logistical and practical constraints often faced when African women scholars try to access international publications and the often poorly indexed material generated in Africa.
Numerous
bibliographies have been produced since the mid-1980s and the rapid growth of
the first significant wave of African feminist scholarship. Particularly important
recent listings include:
The comprehensive and up-to-date on-line African Women's Bibliographical Database provides a detailed index of resources – both in terms of region and in terms of discipline. These include papers presented at conferences in Africa and beyond, journal articles and books published by the larger and more influential publishing houses as well as lesser-known publishing houses. This resource therefore indexes important material not captured in other bibliographies or considered secondary to widely distributed publications. The inclusion of conference papers and postgraduate dissertations in particular signals relatively neglected yet cutting-edge exploratory work and research.
Most existing bibliographies in the field of African women’s and gender studies index specialist areas. Their aims are to offer information to researchers and students who work in particular disciplines. Annotated bibliographies like Giorgis' A Selected and Annotated Bibliography on Women and Health in Africa, published by AAWORD in 1986, or a more recent project produced by the Association for Research and Development, Gender and Development Research in Zambia, An Annotated Bibliography in 1999, exemplify the broader emphasis on specialisation and disciplinary frameworks. Even the comprehensive and extremely up-to-date African Women's Bibliographic Database is oriented towards specialist research in terms of region, discipline and subject. Bibliographies that index different subjects, although in tune with recent interdisciplinary research, are therefore less common. Consequently, this bibliography seeks to confront a gap within the volume of archival work on women and gender in Africa.
My work on this bibliography overlaps with the writing of a review essay on African feminist scholarship. As such, the listing has been an interpretive rather than documentary project, entailing an analysis of trends and conceptual paradigms over the last two decades. Initial work involved searches for key authors and book-length studies in the field. These searches led me to key print bibliographies and internet resources such as the African Women's Bibliographic Database (http://www.africabib.org/women.html), a bibliography of research on Ugandan women, 1986–2001 (http://www.wougnet.org/documents.html#WomenBIB), the gender section of the Africa Resource Centre (http://www.africaresource.com/onl/ogen.htm) and university-based sites like (http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/ssrg/africa/women.html).
The difficulty of obtaining less well-known and circulated African-based publications, such as biographical texts produced in Nigeria, or the wealth of material on women and
peacebuilding in Somalia and Rwanda, presents ongoing challenges despite the numerous links and resources offered by the Internet. This bibliography will therefore contribute to other continental projects that address the paucity of indexes and source material on research within the continent.
A primary aim of this bibliography is to provide a panoramic and cross-disciplinary resource, to identify connections between disciplines and subjects and to offer a macro-overview of patterns of research. In so doing, the bibliography supports two main objectives of the AGI's “Strengthening Gender and Women's Studies in Africa for Social Transformation" Project. One is the goal of helping to build coherence within a field that has often been adversely affected by lack of institutional support to African feminist scholars. The bibliography maps intellectual and political exchanges and patterns of cross-fertilization. This aim seems best served by the use of introductory comments to listings, rather than by the practice of annotating individual listings.
A second objective is to provide a resource for feminist scholars concerned with building fruitful dialogues. This does not simply entail consolidating existing areas of expertise, but working in the context of interdisciplinary and inter-regional studies pivotal to “sustained intellectual and policy dialogue..., [the] strategic coherence of a hitherto fragmented community of scholars located all over the continent [and] engagements [that] enhance both the intellectual quality and the strategic relevance of African teaching and research in the field of gender studies" (Proposal for Strengthening Gender and Women's Studies in Africa for Social Transformation, AGI, May 2001, page 1).
The present bibliography draws extensively on and is deeply indebted to archival and bibliographic work already undertaken in the field of women and gender studies in Africa. I am especially indebted to Margaret Snyder's bibliography and bibliographic essay and the African Women's Bibliographic Database. However, the orientation of the bibliography is shaped by the particular goals of the AGI's capacity-building project. As such its aims are not only to index important material, but to trace connections, dialogues, avenues for further exploration, and, most importantly, opportunities for collaborative or co-operative research.
This is a working bibliography. Listings are by no means definitive, and its purpose is to constitute a dynamic and flexible resource for ongoing exploration of a field experiencing major growth transformation.