This volume brings together a variety of studies that are engaged with notions of gender in different African localities, institutions and historical time periods. The objective is to expand empirical and theoretical studies that take seriously the idea that in order to understand gender and gender relations in Africa, we must start with Africa.

This volume investigates alternative epistemological pathways by which knowledge production in Africa can proceed. The contributors, using different intellectual dynamics, explore the existing epistemological dominance of the West—from architecture to gender discourse, from environmental management to democratic governance—and offer distinct and unique arguments that challenge the denigration of the different and differing modes of knowing that the West considered “barbaric” and “primitive.” This volume therefore constitutes a minimal gesture that further contributes to the ongoing discourse on alternative modes of knowing in Africa.

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of illustrations -- Notes on contributors -- Preface -- Introduction: gendering knowledge in Africa and the African Diaspora -- PART I (Re- )writing gender in African and African Diaspora history -- 1 The Bantu Matrilineal Belt: reframing African women's history -- 2 REMAPping the African Diaspora: place, gender and negotiation in Arabian slavery -- 3 Communicating feminist ethics in the age of New Media in Africa -- PART II Gender, migration and identity -- 4 Transnational feminist solidarity, Black German women and the politics of belonging -- 5 Beyond disability: the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and female heroism in Manu Herbstein's Ama -- 6 Reverse migration of Africans in the Diaspora: foregrounding a woman's quest for her roots in Tess Akaeke Onwueme's Legacies -- PART III Gender, subjection and power -- 7 Queens in flight: Fela Kuti's Afrobeat Queens and the performance of "Black" feminist Diasporas -- 8 Women and tfu in Wimbum Community, Cameroon -- 9 Women's agency and peacebuilding in Nigeria's Jos crises -- 10 Contesting the notions of "thugs and welfare queens": combating Black derision and death -- 11 Culture of silence and gender development in Nigeria -- 12 Emasculation, social humiliation and psychological castration in Irene's More than Dancing -- Index

Gender History Across Epistemologies offers broad range of innovative approaches to gender history. The essays reveal how historians of gender are crossing boundaries - disciplinary, methodological, and national - to explore new opportunities for viewing gender as a category of historical analysis. Essays present epistemological and theoretical debates central in gender history over the past two decades Contributions within this volume to the work on gender history are approached from a wide range of disciplinary locations and approaches The volume demonstrates that recent approaches to gender history suggest surprising crossovers and even the discovery of common grounds

Gender is one of the most productive, dynamic, and vibrant areas of Africanist research today. This volume looks at Africa now that gender has come into play to consider how the continent, its people, and the term itself have changed.

A 2022 Choice Reviews Outstanding Academic Title Negotiating Patriarchy and Gender in Africa: Discourses, Practices, and Policies examines the entrenchment of patriarchy in Africa and its attendant socioeconomic and political consequences on gender relations. The contributors analyze the historical and modern ways in which gender expectations have enabled women in African societies to be systematically abused and marginalized, from unpaid labor to poor representation in decision-making areas. Exploring regions such as rural Uganda, the suburbs of Zimbabwe, the Gold Coast, South Africa, and Nigeria, contributors incorporate a wide range of academic theories and disciplines to establish the need for improved policy implementation on gender issues at both the local and national government levels in Africa.

This volume is a compendium of conceptual frameworks and associated research approaches used for inquiry into gender, sex, and sexualities. It is suitable for use as an advanced textbook.

Postcolonial Hauntologies is an interdisciplinary and comparative analysis of critical, literary, visual, and performance texts by women from different parts of Africa. While contemporary critical thought and feminist theory have largely integrated the sexual female body into their disciplines, colonial representations of African women’s sexuality “haunt” contemporary postcolonial African scholarship which—by maintaining a culture of avoidance about women’s sexuality—generates a discursive conscription that ultimately holds the female body hostage. Ayo A. Coly employs the concept of “hauntology” and “ghostly matters” to formulate an explicative framework in which to examine postcolonial silences surrounding the African female body as well as a theoretical framework for discerning the elusive and cautious presences of female sexuality in the texts of African women. In illuminating the pervasive silence about the sexual female body in postcolonial African scholarship, Postcolonial Hauntologies challenges hostile responses to critical and artistic voices that suggest the African female body represents sacred ideological-discursive ground on which one treads carefully, if at all. Coly demonstrates how “ghosts” from the colonial past are countered by discursive engagements with explicit representations of women’s sexuality and bodies that emphasize African women’s power and autonomy.

This handbook is a foundational reference point for critical heritage research about Africa and its diaspora. Foregrounding the diversity of knowledge systems needed to examine heritage issues in such a diverse continent, the contributors to this volume: argue for an understanding heritage that is at once both natural and cultural, tangible and intangible, political and dissonant, going beyond the physical and objective to include subjective narratives, performances, rituals, memories and emotions examine the pre-coloniality, coloniality, post-coloniality, and decoloniality of current African heritage discourses and their consequences analyse how heritage legislation derived from colonial law is compatible or otherwise with how heritage is perceived, identified and remembered in African communities discuss questions of repatriation, restitution and reparations in relation to the return of artefacts from Western countries illuminate the importance of ‘difficult heritage’ within Africa and its diaspora consider the role of heritage for development in Africa Making a crucial contribution to our understanding of African conceptions and practices of heritage, this book is an important read for scholars of African Studies, heritage and museum studies, archaeology, anthropology and history.

This survey of methodology provides a framework for understanding Africana Studies. Correlating this book to research and writing in Africana Studies, helps to extend the perplexity, paradox, and parley of social science and humanistic research. This book attempts to answer, what is Africana Studies with reference to an interdisciplinary body of knowledge? Africana Studies is the global Pan-Africanist study of African phenomena interpreted from an Afrocentric perspective. Among those scholars who contribute to this interdisciplinary body of knowledge, perspective signals the commonality in the school of thought. This book offers general definitions and descriptions of the qualitative and quantitative research.