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African/Africanist Feminist Relations: Restructuring the Agenda/Agency

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 August 2021

Philomina E. Okeke
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Extract

The controversy surrounding African/Africanist feminist relations is neither a recent phenomenon nor one peculiar to this academic constituency. In the few odd years following the Second Wave, black feminists in the West have challenged the programs and direction of both the feminist movement and academia at every turn. In very succinct terms they rejected any alliance with a political project which, however well meaning, excludes them from the forums where women’s oppression(s) should be named and confronted. As hooks (1988) points out in the case of African American women, in so far as the “authorities” who study them constitute themselves and forge along in “the absence of the voices of the individuals whose experiences they seek to address, ...the subject-object dichotomy is maintained and domination is reinforced.”

Type
Research Article
Information
African Issues , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , 1997 , pp. 34 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1997 

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Footnotes

*

Philomina E. Okeke is from Nigeria. She is an assistant professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at Nipissing University in Ontario, Canada.

References

Notes

1. bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, Toronto: Between the Lines, 43.

2. See, for examples, Samarasinghe, Vidyamali, “The Place of the WID Discourse in Global Feminist Analysis: The Potential for a ‘Reverse Flow,’” in Young, Gay and Dickerson, Bette, eds., Colour, Class and Country: Experiences of Gender, London: Zed Books, 1994, 218-31Google Scholar; Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Russo, Ann, and Torres, Lourdes, eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press Google Scholar; Lazreg, Mania, The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question. New York: Routledge, 1994 Google Scholar.

3. Guyer, Jane, African Studies in the United States: A Perspective. Atlanta: African Studies Association Press, 1996 Google Scholar; Mkandawire, Thandika, “Problems and Prospects of Social Sciences in Africa,” International Sciences Journal, 135, 1993, pp. 130-40Google Scholar.

4. Guyer, 1996, p. 19.

5. See preface to Ifi Amadiume, , Male Daughters and Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society, London: Zed Books, 1987 Google Scholar; Zeleza, Tiyambe, “Gendering African History,” African Development, vol. 18 no. 1, 1993, pp. 116-17Google Scholar; Okeke, Philomina, “Post Modern Feminism and Knowledge of Production: the African Context,” Africa Today, vol. 43, no. 3, July-September, 1996, pp. 223-33Google Scholar.

6. Narayan, Kirin, “How Native is a ‘Native’ Anthropologist?” American Anthropologist, vol. 95, no. 3, 1993, p. 672 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. See Jane Guyer, 1996, p. 8, in response to Owomoyela, Oyekan, “With Friends Like These...A Critique of Pervasive Anti-Africanisms in Current African Studies Epistemology and Methodology,” African Studies Review, vol. 37, no. 3, December 1994, pp. 77–101 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; to charges of Africanists’ exploitation of African scholarship.

8. Mkandawire, 1993, p. 133.

9. Ibid, p. 135.

10. Ibid, p. 130.

11. Behrendt, Larissa, “At the Front of the Class: Experiences as Aboriginal Student and Aboriginal Teacher,” Feminist Review, 52, Spring 1996, pp. 27–35 Google Scholar.