![cover image: Reading African Women [Writers].](https://img.coherentcommons.com/400x600/artifacts/file/img/cd27ac82-6139-4bc5-aa7e-07b592a0a9c6.png)
The works of women African writers such as Bessie Head, Mariama Ba, Buchi Emecheta, and Flora Nwapa have become increasingly familiar to North American college students during the past decade, largely through their inclusion on feminist reading lists. Because the pedagogical value of these texts lies in their presumed ability to speak for African women, the texts are to greater or lesser degrees decontextualized from the material circumstances of production. Rather, they are interrogated with apparently oppositional questions. In identity-based questions, the African woman presumably defined by such questions is, according to Michelle Rosaldo, an image of "ourselves undressed." This exposes the author, cast in the role of spokesperson for the African Woman, to interrogations about her own authenticity. Conversely, another range of questions deconstructs identity-based assumptions and ultimately resists the imperialist politics of representation and authenticity. Both approaches attempt to keep cultural assumptions: both attribute a primal illiteracy to the speakers of "mother tongues" and assume that deconstructive literacy is deployed only in western languages. To use any text as a bridge between academics and African women, it is necessary to be attentive to what degree the factors that shape western notions of literacy are operative in Africa. Such considerations as the traditional privileging of written over oral narrative and culturally encoded interpretive reading practices have crucial implications for the way texts written by women African writers are"consumed" in western classrooms as cultural products. (SAM)
Authors
- Peer Reviewed
- F
- Publication Type
- ['Opinion Papers', 'Speeches/Meeting Papers']
- Published in
- United States of America
Table of Contents
- Cynthia Ward 2
- University of Hawaii Manoa 2
- I originally wrote this paper for a conference in Nigeria called International Conference on 2
- Women in Africa and the African Diaspora Bridges Across Activism and the Academy. As you 2
- Senegal and Buchi Emecheta and Flora Nwapa of Nigeria have become increasingly familiar to 2
- North American college students during the past decade largely through their inclusion on feminist 2
- In the first range are found the identity-based kinds of questions asked by the earliest 2
- Nwankwo in primitive society. The African Woman sought here is in the words of Michelle 3
- Rosa ldo an imageof ourselves undressed. This undressing exposes the author who has been 3
- This is not to deny or devalue the important cultural work done by postcolonial women 3
- Gaytri Spivaks words postcolonial women writers such as Assia Djebar expose .. . 4
- To begin to use a text--any text--as a bridge between academics and African women we 4
- Spivak elides is that what we call writing is only only a particular kind of writingand that the 4
- We should therefore be particularly attentive as possible to how texts are read. Is the process by 4
- An example of reading in the contact zone is found in Susan Blakes Uters from Togo 5
- Africa. In a chapter entitled The Color Purple Blake recounts how she had given a copy of 5
- Alice Walkers novel to a friend a Ghanaian English teacher. Blake learned that this woman 5
- The Color Purple devour it teach it analyze it praise it but unconsciously translate it into terms 5
- Or if we do wonder we dont know any 5
- Celie. Blake says that Amano was a reader who was like Celie at least in her relationship to 5
- Blake who doesnt speak Mina. Blake reports that between the natural meanderings of a 6
- English major Blake calls Ameyou. Upon being told Amanos story he says I know Amano. I 7
- Ive come to know Amano a little too. But only a little. And that little has taken so much--the 7
- What Blake ultimately affirms in her feeling of recognition is western literacys power--a 7
- Without attempting a more correct interpretation of the experience that Blake reports I want 7
- Amamos way of reading takes the fictional text into her own life is not as different from that of the 7
- Secondly questions that guide meaning into channels of interpretive reading practices may 8
- 3 I say Blake calls because I am not certain that is her real name. As a resident of Lomé for 9
- Derrida Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore 10
- Haraway Donna. A Manifesto For Cyborgs Science Technology and Socialist 10
- Feminism in the 1980s. 5ocialist Review 80 March-April 1985 65-107. 10
- Ojo-Ade Femi. Of Culture Commitment and Construction Reflections on African 10
- Literature. Transition 53 1991 4-24. 10
- Pratt Mary Louise. Arts of the Contact Zone. Profession 91 33-40. 10
- Hill U North Carolina P. 1984 1991. 10
- Rosaldo M. Z. The Use and Abuse of Anthropology Reflections on Feminism and Cross- 10
- Spivak Gayatri Chakravorty. Can the Subaltern Speak Marxism and the Interpmation 10
