Search results for ""Author Judith A. Byfield""

This social and intellectual history of women’s political activism in postwar Nigeria reveals the importance of gender to the study of nationalism and poses new questions about Nigeria’s colonial past and independent future. In the years following World War II, the women of Abeokuta, Nigeria, staged a successful tax revolt that led to the formation first of the Abeokuta Women’s Union and then of Nigeria’s first national women’s organization, the Nigerian Women’s Union, in 1949. These organizations became central to a new political vision, a way for women across Nigeria to define their interests, desires, and needs while fulfilling the obligations and responsibilities of citizenship. In The Great Upheaval, Judith A. Byfield has crafted a finely textured social and intellectual history of gender and nation making that not only tells a story of women’s postwar activism but also grounds it in a nuanced account of the complex tax system that generated the “upheaval.” Byfield captures the dynamism of women’s political engagement in Nigeria’s postwar period and illuminates the centrality of gender to the study of nationalism. She thus offers new lines of inquiry into the late colonial era and its consequences for the future Nigerian state. Ultimately, she challenges readers to problematize the collapse of her female subjects' greatest aspiration, universal franchise, when the country achieved independence in 1960.

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This volume builds on and extends current discussions of the construction of gendered identities and the networks through which men and women engage diaspora. It considers the movement of people and ideas between the Caribbean and the Nigerian hinterland. The contributions examine Africa in the Caribbean imaginary, the way in which gender ideologies inform Caribbean men's and women's theoretical or real-life engagement with the continent, and the interactions and experiences of Caribbean travelers in Africa and Europe. The contributions are linked as well through empire, discussing different parts of the British Empire and allowing for the comparative examination of colonial policies and practices.

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