Crises in African Feminist TheorisationAfrican women's response to the inequities of white middle-class western and African-American feminisms has been to theorise their own feminisms in concurrence with Africa's historical and cultural trajectories. Accusing these feminisms of obsession with sexual politics, feigned blindness to racism, prejudiced indifference to colonialism's re-organisation of gender hierarchies in Africa, and a utopian celebration of blackness, scholars such as Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi, Obioma Nnaemeka, Catherine Obianuju Acholonu, Molara Ogundipe-Leslie, Chioma Opara, Akachi Adimora Ezeigbo, and Mary Modupe Kolawole have propounded their own feminist models which bear marks of indigeneity and are at once transnationally located.The womanisms of Ogunyemi (1985; 1996) and Kolawole (1997) emphasise African women's resistance of not only patriarchal domination but also ethnic discrimination, linguistic segregation, poverty and illiteracy as well as other forms of oppression which condemn women to male servitude. Nnaemeka's nego-feminism (2003) reiterates the need for a multi-pronged approach to combat gender inequalities, stressing the need for negotiation and the suppression of egoistic tendencies which may forestall rather than enhance the meaningful partnership between women and men that is fundamental to the feminist cause. Ezeigbo's snail-sense feminism (2012) further advances the necessity of negotiation, collaboration, tolerance and accommodation in the feminist fight against gender inequities and injustices. Acholonu (1995) calls her feminist brand motherism and describes it as an Afrocentric alternative to feminism. Motherism has echoes of Opara's femalism (2005) as both models conceptualise female power at the intersections of motherhood, nature and nurture. By contrast, Ogundipe-Leslie's stiwanism (1994) locates female power in women's agency as they strive for the social and political transformation of Africa.These theories take cognizance of the different contexts of women's lived experiences, acknowledging that, in addition to gender, African women have suffered injustices on the basis of race (being black), class (being poor), ethnicity (being of a minority ethnic group), language (being speakers of an indigenous language), and marital status (being single). In addition, they recognise that the colonial expedition in Africa exacerbated the patriarchal domination of women where colonised women were further subjugated through denial of access to education and civil privileges in colonial administrations. In the postcolonial context, women have been struggling to catch up with men in areas of personal development, white-collar employment, professional careers, and state management. African feminisms address these women's concerns with a visceral insight that white middle-class western and African-American feminisms did not exhibit. As Nnaemeka (2013: 318) notes, while claiming the feminist spirit and ideal - equity based on fairness and justice - in their respective traditional milieu and elsewhere, African women expand the horizon of feminist engagement by posing new questions and imposing new demands.In spite of the robustness of their theorisation, African feminisms are marked by contradictions, exclusions and ambivalences, all of which signify a difficulty in proposing a single theoretical framework for a multiplicity of peoples with varied cultures and histories. Underlying intratheoretical and inter-theoretical tensions point to a need for continuous engagement with African feminisms, especially at the present time when imperialism and neoimperialism are packaged and distributed in Africa as global feminism. African feminisms need to be strengthened to withstand the erosive forces of western imperialism and to enforce their legitimacy in global feminist politics. Introspectively, they also have to acknowledge their internal fault lines on the basis of which a politics of difference continues to be perpetuated. …
This article examines two plays performed by Dramatic Arts students of the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) during the 2010 Orientation Week (O-Week): Beyond Therapy by Christopher Durang and Vacant by Lareece Kelly. The plays were staged at the Wits Theatre, with sizeable audiences made up mainly of students. Both plays have queer sexuality as the central thrust of the narratives and yet they differ in the ways in which the protagonists affirm their identity. The article discusses the various modes of self-fashioning adopted by the protagonists and how their choices influence transformation in terms of the re-thinking of attitudes, practices and ideologies related to queer sexualities in South Africa. It argues, ultimately, that the performance of sexuality is a transgressive act through which the gay/bisexual protagonists fashion their identities according to their individual desires and preferences. The plays discussed were studied through observations during which relevant data were collected.
In this article, we discuss the application of feminist theory and criticism in the teaching of Shakespeare in higher education institutions and consider biographical approaches to Shakespeare as instructive for pedagogic engagements with students. We present an analysis of students’ responses to a short YouTube video about Shakespeare’s life used in a second-year English course for pre-service teachers at a South African university. The design and implementation of the course was informed by feminist Shakespeare criticism and theory which challenges the misogynistic attitudes and patriarchal ideologies embedded in Shakespeare’s works, as well as the sexist images of women appearing in many of his plays and poems. The analysis of students’ responses to Shakespeare’s life reveals that students found him to be an absent and a fugitive father and husband as well as a misogynist. Students nevertheless expressed sympathy for Shakespeare, which was neither dismissive nor defensive of his absenteeism and sexism. We argue therefore that the students’ responses echoed feminist interventions that counter the masculinist perspectives dominant in many biographical studies of Shakespeare.
We teach English literature in South Africa, to third- or fourth-language English speakers. Increasingly dissatisfied with the effectiveness of our pedagogy under conditions of massification, we seek to agitate propositions about our students’ reading and what these propositions means for our pedagogy. Drawing on narrative theory we analyse our students’ written responses to a portfolio assessment designed to scaffold their reading of a setwork novel, Lauren Beukes’ Zoo City. Six patterns emerge, around paraphrase, compensation strategies that replace literary reading, repertoires of knowledge and how these relate to access, personal salience and dissonance, reader discomfort, and decolonial opportunities. Understanding the students’ reading for our course as a complex web of material, social and affective relations opens avenues for pedagogy and assessment design that frames literary reading as communal encounter.
This article is an analysis of Dance of the vampires by Cameroonian playwright, Bole Butake. It looked at how the play projects itself as a narrative of the nation and, conversely, how the nation in the play functions as a narrative text on which ideologies of power are inscribed or expunged. Butake’s vision of the nation encompasses various discourses of power that are explored against the backdrop of the grotesque in systems of domination, as enunciated by Achille Mbembe. This article argues that whilst the play hinges on the ambivalence in power relations, the writer’s vision is un-ambivalent in its utopian conception of political change and its gendered representation of women within nationalist discourses.
In many universities offering qualifications in education, Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy features prominently in curricula for pre-service teachers of English. Student teachers are prepared with the knowledge and skills that enable them to use approaches from critical pedagogy to teach English effectively in their classrooms upon graduation. Critical pedagogy affords pre-service teachers of English training in teaching critical literacy, a pedagogy of self-empowerment, and tools for teaching critical thinking. However, student teachers may not easily exploit these affordances when they start to teach since many constraints in the school system may impede the effective implementation of critical pedagogy in the English classroom. These constraints include the inflexible Annual Teaching Plan, the practice of teaching for assessment, and contradictions in the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS). As a result, there is a disparity between the vision of teaching English in critical ways on the one hand and opportunities to realise this vision within the structures of South African policy on the other. In this article, we explore this disparity and its implications for learning to teach English within a critical pedagogy framework.
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