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- Convenors:
-
Duduzile Sakhelene Ndlovu
(University of the Witwatersrand)
Peilin Yu (Faculty of Arts and Humanities - University of Coimbra)
Nafeesah Allen (Univ of the Witerwatersrand)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Disciplinary streams:
- Knowledge production and methodologies
Short Abstract
This panel examines women’s authorship as a unique praxis across the contested colonial and post-colonial spaces of Southern Africa. We explore how women telling women's stories subverts tokenization and creates new local methodologies.
Long Abstract
This panel investigates women’s authorship as a praxis for navigating the contested and fractured colonial territories of Southern Africa. Focusing on the geographies of Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Zambia, Namibia, and Botswana, we explore how women, all who self-identify as female, regardless of assigned sex or gender history, telling their own stories serves as a critical intervention in knowledge production. Focusing on the tension of post-coloniality: the juxtaposition between the symbolic association of women as the “mother of the nation” holding traditional values and customs and the actual role of women in nationalist, liberation-era revolutions and nation-building. Bringing direct, un-siloed dialogue betwen Anglophone and Lusophone cultural productions, literature, film, and social media, allows us to look at how women’s creative curation disrupts patriarchal and nation-state centered frameworks. We ask:
1. How are local languages, oral archives, and indigenous traditions articulated through authorship?
2. How does the post-colonial African woman in the Southern African region negotiate, co-produce and/or resist their representation?
3. How do contemporary cultural productions mobilize indigenous traditions to generate localized knowledge?
3. How can researchers ethically navigate translation and language barriers to build comparative Southern African feminist methodologies?
We invite papers addressing the above for a critical dialogue that repositions Southern African women not merely as subjects of research, but as primary producers of theory, methodology and knowledge. NB: We ask panelists to reflect on their citation practices: the diversity of voices they are engaging with in their paper and how they might engage new voices.