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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Gender and 'the Public Sphere' in Africa: Writing Women and Rioting Women |
Author: | Andrade, Susan |
Year: | 2002 |
Periodical: | Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity |
Issue: | 54 |
Pages: | 45-59 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | Africa |
Subjects: | nationalism gender relations national liberation movements women writers literature |
External link: | https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10130950.2002.9676177 |
Abstract: | The author explores some theoretical and methodological issues surrounding the question of women's involvement in and gender figuration under decolonizing nationalism in Africa. She argues that, at a moment when the cultural production and political agitation of African men were easily assimilated to a nationalist paradigm, women's culture and politics were often understood as unrelated to nationalism and, therefore, as not engaged in the larger political process. On the one hand, following a model proposed by Jurgen Habermas, the author examines the emergence of mid-20th-century middle-class African women into the sphere of literary writing, and into that of novel writing in particular. On the other hand, she explores how different plebeian and petty bourgeois African women negotiated the sphere of civil society at around the time of decolonization. Looking at these two different classes of women in relation to each other and ideas of the public civil sphere allows a reconception of the public sphere, civil society and women's engagement with decolonizing nationalism. Bibliogr., notes, ref. [ASC Leiden abstract] |