Description
Book SynopsisAfrican writers and literary critics must account for the changing political terrain and how these contribute to creating new sources of conflicts and aggression toward women. This book brings insight and scholarly breadth to the growing research on women, war, and conflict in Africa. The aftermath of wars and conflicts initiates new forms of violence and related gender challenges. The contributors establish compelling evidence for the significance of gender in the analyses of contemporary warfare and conflict. Articulating war''s consequences for women and children remains a major challenge for critics, policy makers, and human rights organizations. There is a need for deeper understanding of the new sources of violence and male aggression on women, the gendered challenges of reintegration in the aftermath, and the future consequences of gendered violence for the African continent. This book will be useful to scholars, researchers, instructors, students of literature in the humanities
Trade ReviewPauline Uwakweh’s edited volume brings out a fresh and equally significant perspective that focuses upon the much-needed African women’s literary responses to wars and armed conflicts. . . Pauline Uwakweh beautifully gives a critique of a patriarchy and especially literary patriarchy, while bringing war and gender issues under study. Her book demonstrates how women’s voices are missing in war literature and what can be done to overcome this lacuna. Women under Fire is certainly going to be an authentic source on literary discourse on war and conflict besides being a credible work on African literary criticism in the gender arena. Given its thick description the work is too provoking for future researchers not to go further and deeper into the themes touched upon. Throughout the chapters there been an intellectual engagement with various socio-literary themes bringing out various war realities especially the gendered relations and power play between them. This work can indeed be called Pauline Uwakweh’s and her fellow coauthors’ labor of love. * African Studies Quarterly *
Touching on the war experiences of African women, including combat, captivity, and rape, the nine essays in African Women Under Fire: Literary Discourses in War and Conflict, edited by Pauline Ada Uwakweh, engage female agency, resiliency, trauma, violence, and the roles of memory and testimony. Bringing together a wide variety of theories and approaches, the contributors re-examine African war literature from a gendered, postcolonial frame that encompasses trauma studies, psychoanalysis, immigration studies, and the problems of representation. -- Joya Uraizee, Saint Louis University
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. -- Maurice Taonezvi Vambe, University of South Africa
Table of ContentsForeword
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
