Published 2023-09-28
Keywords
- gender,
- African history,
- time and temporality,
- interdisciplinary,
- queer African studies
How to Cite
Copyright (c) 2023 Jonna Katto, Heike Becker
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Abstract
This special issue seeks to problematize the way that time and gender – and their relationship to each other – is conceptualized in prevailing historical narratives about African pasts. Often we take these notions for granted in our practices of research and writing. Even today, histories about gender in Africa often continue to be framed by Eurocentric teleological narratives of modernity. In this special issue – that brings together scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds, focusing on different time periods, and using different methodological approaches – we ask what would happen if we brought the notions of time and gender into a more critical focus. How would this reshape the gendered histories we write?
References
- Abrahams, Yvette. 1996. “Was Eva Raped? An Exercise in Speculative History.” Kronos 23: 3–21.
- Amadiume, Ifi. 1987. Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society. London: Zen.
- Amadiume, Ifi. 1997. Reinventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion and Culture. London: Zed Books.
- Bam, June. 2021. Ausi Told Me: Why Cape Herstoriographies Matter. Johannesburg: Jacana.
- Bam, June, and Bernedette Muthien. 2021. “Introduction.” In Indigenous Women Re-Interpret Southern Africa’s Pasts, edited by Bernedette Muthien and June Bam, 3–15. Sunnyside: Jacana.
- Boydston, Jeanne. 2009. “Gender as a Question of Historical Analysis.” In Gender and Change: Agency, Chronology and Periodisation, edited by Alexandra Shepard and Garthine Walker, 133–165. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
- Brown, Elsa Barkley. 1992. “‘What Has Happened Here’: The Politics of Difference in Women’s History and Feminist Politics.” Feminist Studies 18 (2): 295–312.
- Browne, Victoria. 2014. Feminism, Time, and Nonlinear History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
- Cooper, Frederick. 2000. “Africa’s Pasts and Africa’s Historians.” Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines 34 (2): 298–336.
- Dinshaw, Carolyn, Lee Edelman, Roderick A. Ferguson, Carla Freccero, Elizabeth Freeman, Judith Halberstam, Annamarie Jagose, Christopher S. Nealon, and Tan Hoang Nguyen. 2007. “Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13 (2–3): 177–195.
- Ellis, Stephen. 2002. “Writing Histories of Contemporary Africa.” Journal of African History 43 (1): 1–26.
- Fabian, Johannes. 2002. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press.
- Fiereck, Kirk, Neville Hoad, and Danai S. Mupotsa. 2020. “A Queering-to-Come.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 26 (3): 363–376.
- Freeman, Elizabeth. 2010. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham: Duke University Press.
- Jewsiewicki, B., and V. Y. Mudimbe. 1993. “Africans’ Memories and Contemporary History of Africa.” History and Theory 32 (4): 1–11.
- Jordanova, Ludmilla. 2006. History in Practice. London: Hodder Arnold.
- Kelly-Gadol, Joan. 1984. “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” In Women, History and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly, edited by Joan Kelly-Gadol, 19–50. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Liljeström, Marianne. 2019. “Feminism and Queer Temporal Complexities.” SQS – Journal of Queer Studies in Finland 13 (1–2): 23–38.
- Macharia, Keguro. 2015. “Archive and Method in Queer African Studies.” Agenda 29 (1): 140–146.
- Maseko, Pamela. 2018. “Language as Source of Revitalisation and Reclamation of Indigenous Epistemologies: Contesting Assumptions and Re-imagining Women Identities in (African) Xhosa Society.” In Whose History Counts: Decolonising African Pre-Colonial Historiography, edited by June Bam, Lungisile Ntsebeza, and Allan Zinn, 35–56. Stellenbosch: African Sun Media.
- Matebeni, Zethu. 2021. “Nongayindoda: Moving Beyond Gender in a South African Context.” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 39 (4): 565–575.
- Mbah, Ndubueze L. 2019. Emergent Masculinities: Gendered Power and Social Change in the Biafran Atlantic Age. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.
- Mbasalaki, Phoebe Kisubi. 2020. “Through the Lens of Modernity: Reflections on the (Colonial) Cultural Archive of Sexuality and Gender in South Africa.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 26 (3): 455–475.
- Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Postcolony. London: University of California Press.
- Mbembe, Achille. 2022. “Africa in Theory.” Public online seminar held as part of the Seminar Series on “The Changing African Idea of Africa and the Future of African Studies”, organized by the Chair in Epistemologies of the Global South with Emphasis on Africa at the University of Bayreuth in Germany in collaboration with the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS) at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, Zoom, April 21, 2022.
- Meneses, Maria Paula. 2019. “Tastes, Aromas, and Knowledges: Challenges to a Dominant Epistemology.” In Knowledges Born in the Struggle Constructing the Epistemologies of the Global South, edited by Sousa Santos Boaventura and Maria Paula Meneses, 162–180. New York: Routledge.
- Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. London: New York University Press.
- Muthien, Bernedette, and June Bam, eds. 2021. Indigenous Women Re-Interpret Southern Africa’s Pasts. Sunnyside: Jacana.
- Nyanzi, Stella. 2014. “Queering Queer Africa.” In Reclaiming Afrikan: Queer Perspectives on Gender and Sexual Identities, edited by Zethu Matebeni, 65–70. Cape Town: Modjaji Books.
- Ochonu, Moses E. 2015. “Elusive History: Fractured Archives, Politicized Orality, and Sensing the Postcolonial Past.” History in Africa 42: 287–298.
- Ogundiran, Akinwumi. 2020. The Yoruba: A New History. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
- Oyĕwùmí, Oyèrónké. 1997. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. London: University of Minnesota.
- Oyĕwùmí, Oyèrónké. 2004. “Conceptualizing Gender: Eurocentric Foundations of Feminist Concepts and the Challenge of African Epistemologies.” In African Gender Scholarship: Concepts, Methodologies and Paradigms, edited by Signe Arnfred, Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, Edward Waswa Kisiang’ani, Desiree Lewis, Oyèrónké Oyĕwùmí, and Filomina Chioma Steady, 1–8. Dakar, Senegal: Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa.
- Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónké. 2016. What Gender Is Motherhood?: Changing Yorùbá Ideals of Power, Procreation, and Identity In the Age of Modernity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.
- Salo, Elaine. 2010. “Men, Women, Temporality and Critical Ethnography in Africa – the Imperative for a Transdisciplinary Conversation.” Anthropology Southern Africa 33 (3–4): 93–102.
- Scott, Joan W. 1986. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” American Historical Review 91 (5): 1053–1075.
- Schèues, Christina, Dorothea Olkowski, and Helen Fielding, eds. 2011. Time in Feminist Phenomenology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
- Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press.
- Shepard, Alexandra, and Garthine Walker. 2008. “Gender, Change and Periodisation.” Gender & History 20 (3): 453–462.
- Tamale, Sylvia. 2020. Decolonization and Afro-Feminism. Ottawa: Daraja Press.