African Feminism

Zusatztext

In their various efforts to challenge hegemonic narratives and the coloniality of power that shapes their everyday lives, contemporary African feminist writers have enacted and expanded decolonial perspectives. The process of decoloniality in African feminist literature revisits and interrogates power dynamics rooted in the coloniality of gender and power. Proceeding from this understanding, this dissertation shows how African women writers critically subvert patriarchy, sexism, and the Western feminist homogenization of women of colour in the Global South whose experiences are often ignored in hegemonic mainstream discourses. The dissertation applies narrative theory, intersectionality, womanism, and decoloniality to critically assess African womens literature and argues that contemporary African feminist ideas emerging from Cameroon and Nigeria reveal new strands and variants of feminism that embrace global multipositionalities and remain grounded in lived experiences. Decolonial feminist scholarship embraces difference by deviating from dominant structures in order to reclaim, reconfigure, and reposition African womens voices. The two selected contexts, Cameroon and Nigeria, demonstrate fictional texts by women that foreground and disentangle the complexity of heteropatriarchy, colonialism, neoliberalism, imperialism, migration, and globalization forces that humanity, and women in particular as the most vulnerable group, continue to confront. Womens voices, especially those of African women, have been historically silenced in hegemonic literature as well as in Western feminist movements and organizations, despite their crucial role in liberation struggles. Patriarchy has sustained the dominant ideological attitude of heterosexual male dominance across systems and institutions of knowledge production and continues to do so. Hence, in the Cameroonian and Nigerian literary imagination, African feminists have questioned and continue to question these entrenched standards of oppression that contribute to the marginal positioning of women.

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