Today we are sharing the open-access special issue of Meridians on “African Feminism – Cartographies for the 21st Century” with an extended introduction by issue co-editor, Dr. Gabeba Baderoon, who also tells us about her scholarly and creative writing. Duke University Press has made this issue free to download until March and it includes essays, poems, activist accounts, memoirs, reflections, notes from the trenches and the archive, and a beautiful cover photo. The collection of work in this important issue shows the diversity and vibrancy of African feminisms and we encourage you to download your own free copy!
By: Gabeba Baderoon
Thank you for the invitation to share the background story of this issue of Meridians, along with something about my own work, on the Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa (CIHA) Blog about a unique project that produced this issue, and that, like the CIHA Blog, seeks egalitarian modes of knowledge dissemination.
I am a poet and literary scholar based in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and the Program in African Studies at Penn State University and also hold an Extraordinary Professorship (a visiting appointment) in the English Department at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. My training is in English literature but I have an eclectic set of research interests, and have written on portrayals of slavery and Islam in South Africa, visual art about queer intimacy and how post-apartheid images of dogs allow us to trace the boundary of the human, among other topics. I work with colleagues at Stellenbosch University, the University of Cape Town and Gothenburg University on research projects on gender and Islam in Africa, concepts of dirt in Africa, and the literature of slavery.
I am a creative writer as well as a critical scholar. In 1999, shortly after starting my PhD studies, I took an evening class in writing poetry, which quickly became central to my life. I’ve since published four books of poetry, The Dream in the Next Body (2005), The Museum of Ordinary Life (2005), A hundred silences (2006) and The History of Intimacy (2018), and a monograph, Regarding Muslims: from Slavery to Post-apartheid (2014), which explores the “ambiguous visibility” of Muslims in South African culture. For several years while earning tenure, I put aside my poetry in order to write critical work, but exiling this part of me distanced me from a core part of my creativity. It took me until I finished my monograph for me to fold poetry organically into my work. Since 2015, I’ve practiced the two together and am as often invited to give poetry readings as lectures. I’m encouraged in this by my colleagues in feminist African literary studies, scholars like Tsitsi Jaji, Pumla Dineo Gqola, Barbara Boswell and Makhosazana Xaba who are poets, novelists, editors and memoirists as well as literary critics.
In my most recent poetry collection, The History of Intimacy, I return to my beginnings as a writer by reflecting on a vital and promising decade, the 1990s, that was also marked by betrayal. Two decades from that time, I face the complicated desires and memories obscured by the obvious political drama of the ending of apartheid. The History of Intimacy was published 19 years after I took that evening class in poetry.
The most exciting project I’m currently involved in is the African Feminist Initiative at Penn State, which my friend, Alicia Decker, a feminist historian who works on gender and militarism in Uganda, and I co-founded in 2015. The AFI was inspired by the critical mass of African feminist scholars at Penn State – we had seven founding members and our numbers have grown since. Maha Marouan, who writes on the religious practices of women in Morocco and the African diaspora, co-directs the AFI with Alicia and me. We are based in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and seek to advance the teaching and research of African feminisms in the US, and to build strong and reciprocal connections with Africa-based colleagues and activists. We teach graduate and undergraduate courses on African feminisms at Penn State. Our projects include an active list-serve and monthly online meetings on topics like the implications of terms for feminist solidarity such as “sisterhood” for those who do not identify as women, the impact of colonially-derived lines of division such as “North Africa” and “Sub-Saharan Africa” for contemporary African identity, and the challenges facing those of us who teach African feminisms. These conversations are recorded and posted on our website, http://afi.la.psu.edu/.
Of course, in-person meetings remain crucial. In Fall 2016, we hosted a gathering of colleagues from nine African countries as well as the US and Canada to discuss the state of African feminist theory and activism, and in May 2017, we held a workshop on African Muslim feminisms in Fez, Morocco. We use the opportunity of such meetings as well as our AFI lecture series to conduct in-depth interviews with visiting scholars, through which we are building an oral history on African Feminisms. Our 2016 conference on the state of the field led to a special issue of Meridians journal on “African Feminisms: Cartographies for the Twenty-First Century,” featuring essays, poetry and visual art by some of the most interesting scholars in the field (Duke University Press has made the issue available for free online until March 1, 2019 at this link: https://read.dukeupress.edu/meridians/issue/17/2). We hope that the issue will have a broad audience both on the African continent and beyond. The AFI also offers a Feminist Residency, which enables a scholar or activist to devote much-needed time to writing.
This April, Penn State will host an international conference on African feminist history, with keynote speeches from Amina Mama and Yvette Abrahams.
Equitable partnerships with scholars and activists on the continent are central to the AFI’s vision. AFI members attended the Decolonizing Feminisms conference at Wits University in 2016 and the African Feminisms conference at Rhodes University in 2018. Future plans include a much-needed publication on African feminist history and we will be working with Nigerian and South African colleagues on continental African feminist conferences. Please do visit the AFI’s website and please use the opportunity to read and download the special issue of Meridians on African feminisms.