Un/clothing African womanhood: colonial statements and postcolonial discourses of the African female body

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Periodical article

Title:	Un/clothing African womanhood: colonial statements and postcolonial discourses of the African female body
Author:	Coly, Ayo A.
Year:	2015
Periodical:	Journal of Contemporary African Studies (ISSN 1469-9397)
Volume:	33
Issue:	1
Pages:	12-26
Language:	English
Geographic terms:	Africa Nigeria Senegal
Subjects:	women body female dress images postcolonialism
External link:	https://doi.org/10.1080/02589001.2015.1021209
Abstract:	Using the examples of the partially unclothed African woman in Senegal's controversial African Renaissance Monument (2009) and the 2008 proposed Anti-Nudity bill in Nigeria, this article probes postcolonial African engagements with the female body. The essay proposes that such postcolonial African preoccupations with how the female body is presented and seen should be contextualised in the fray of postcolonial African endeavours to resignify Africa, in response to colonial discourses. The essays bind these preoccupations to an ideologico-discursive continuum that has produced and sustained the African female body as a rhetorical element of colonialism then postcolonialism. Bibliogr., sum. [Journal abstract]