140149 VO African Women's Writing and African Feminism (2016W)

Content: The issues of women’s rights and liberation from patriarchy were secondary in the history of African emancipation struggles that were primarily focused on political independence. They came to the fore-front with the arrival women into the literary arena after independence and from the beginning constituted a controversial subject that appeared to privilege Western modernity in place of African tradition. African male writers’ rewriting of the history written by the colonizer privileged male achievement and symbolically displaced women from the nation, relegating them to the traditional domestic space and reproductive roles. In fact, male embracing of aspects of Western modernity depended upon preventing women’s access to that modernity, appointing women as guardians of tradition. African women writers reacted to these false dichotomies with their own rewriting of the male history of the anti-colonial struggles and independence, problematizing the meaning of independence, the nation, tradition and modernity. At the same time, they were negotiating their own place in the global women’s movement and assessing the usefulness of Western feminist ideas for their own needs. Contemporary African women’s writing shows development in thinking about African women’s roles and struggles, the definitions of African feminism, and the larger question of the meaning of African modernity. At the same time, feminism is not exclusive to women’s writing but characterizes also literature by male writers. Rather than focusing just on the political aspect of this literature, this course will emphasize the relationship between the politics, aesthetics and socio-historical and material context in order to explore the role of the literary text in the circulation of a global image of Africa. We will examine a variety of genres, including the novel, the short story, the memoir, the essay and the Bildungsroman, as well as theoretical writing, and explore their function and effectiveness.

learning objectives: On completion of this course the student will have developed the ability to:
identify, analyse and understand key political, philosophical and aesthetic issues in African women’s writing
understand the development of African discussions on women’s rights and African modernity
apply close reading skills to a variety of literary texts and be able to analyze them from a literary-critical perspective
reflect critically on the relations between primary texts and relevant secondary texts