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This book brings insight and scholarly breadth through literary criticism to the growing research on women, war, and conflict in Africa. The contributors establish compelling evidence for the significance of gender in the analyses of contemporary warfare and conflict.
List of contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Part I: Female, Victim, Agent: African Women in War and Conflict
Introduction: Exploring African Women and the War Experience-A Critical Update, by Pauline Ada Uwakweh
Chapter 1: At the Center, Taking Charge: Disruptive Discourse and Female Agency in Buchi Emecheta's Destination Biafra and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun, by Jessie Sagawa
Chapter 2: An Attempt at Inclusion: Reading the War Theme in Black Zimbabwean Women Texts, by Tendai Mangena
Chapter 3: The Female Body as Locus for National Trauma in the Fiction of Yvonne Vera, by Melissa R. Root
Chapter 4: Fanta Nacro's Night of Truth: the Journey to the End of the Night, by P. Julie Papaioannou
Chapter 5: Resilient Strategies and Reconstruction in Leonora Miano's Literary Writing, by Paul N. Touré
Part II: Trauma, Reintegration, Healing: Transcending the Aftermath of Wars and Conflicts
Chapter 6: Memoir versus Fiction: Narrating Trauma in Girl Soldier: A Story of Hope for Northern Uganda's Children and Thirty Girls, by Pauline Ada Uwakweh
Chapter 7: "I Just Wanted To Forget It All. But It Was Impossible:" Umutesi and the Politics of Testimony in Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire, by Emilie Diouf
Chapter 8: Victims' Narratives versus Perpetrators Testimonies: Understanding Violence against Women in Armed Conflicts in Africa, by Moussa Issifou
Chapter 9: Testimony as Text: "Performative Vulnerability" and the Limits of Legalistic Approaches to Refugee Protection, by Nanjala Nyabola
About the Contributors
About the author
By Pauline Ada Uwakweh - Contributions by E?milie Diouf; Moussa Issifou; Tendai Mangena; Nanjala Nyabola; Julie Papaioannou; Melissa R. Root; Jessie Sagawa; Paul N. Touré and Pauline Ada Uwakweh
Summary
This book brings insight and scholarly breadth through literary criticism to the growing research on women, war, and conflict in Africa. The contributors establish compelling evidence for the significance of gender in the analyses of contemporary warfare and conflict.
Additional text
For too long in the history of fiction writing in Africa, the tendency has been to portray women as literary shadows of male creative imagination. In African Women Under Fire: Literary Discourses in War and Conflict, one senses in the critical essays on women’s war literature, a significant and necessary step towards disrupting the masculinization of the African critical enterprise in the literary domain. Never again will African women’s creative voices be mere appendages in anthologies composed by men.
