1st Edition
Gendered Violence and Human Rights in Black World Literature and Film
This book investigates how the intersection between gendered violence and human rights is depicted and engaged with in Africana literature and films.
The rich and multifarious range of film and literature emanating from Africa and the diaspora provides a fascinating lens through which we can understand the complex consequences of gendered violence on the lives of women, children and minorities. Contributors to this volume examine the many ways in which gendered violence mirrors, expresses, projects and articulates the larger phenomenon of human rights violations in Africa and the African diaspora and how, in turn, the discourse of human rights informs the ways in which we articulate, interrogate, conceptualise and interpret gendered violence in literature and film. The book also shines a light on the linguistic contradictions and ambiguities in the articulation of gendered violence in private spaces and war.
This book will be essential reading for scholars, critics, feminists, teachers and students seeking solid grounding in exploring gendered violence and human rights in theory and practice.
INTRODUCTION
Exploring the nexus between gendered violence and human rights
Obioma Nnaemeka and Naomi Nkealah
PART I: THE VIOLENCE OF LANGUAGE IN GENDERED SPACES
1. The public-ation of domestic violence in Calixthe Beyala’s Le Christ selon l’Afrique
Gloria Onyeoziri-Miller
2. Gendered violence and narrative erasure: Women in Athol Fugard’s Tsotsi and Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi
Katwiwa Mule
3. Exploring the language of violence and human rights violation in selected Nigerian dramatic literature
Olutoba Gboyega Oluwasuji
4. Women on the move: The construction of the woman migrant’s story in African cinema
Kenneth W. Harrow
PART II: SEXUALITIES, CULTURES AND EXCLUSIONS
5. "Putting her in her place!" Gender and sexual violence in Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come and Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives
Asante Lucy Mtenje
6. Human rights in spaces of violence: Exploring the intersections of gender, violence and lesbian sexuality in selected African fiction by women
Jessica Murray
7. Gender, disruption and reconciliation in the Ugandan short fiction of Beatrice Lamwaka
Sally Ann Murray
PART III: SUBVERTING STORIES OF WAR
8. Women and violence on the Algerian screen: Documenting les années noires in Yasmina Bachir-Chouikh’s Rachida and Djamila Sahraoui’s Barakat! (Enough!)
Valérie K. Orlando
9. "A strange combination of femininity and menace": Re-thinking the figure of the female soldier in Nadifa Mohamed’s The Orchard of Lost Souls
Lynda Gichanda Spencer
10. Domestic violence in China Keitetsi’s Child Soldier
Tomi Adeaga
11. Gendered spaces and war: Fighting and narrating the Nigeria-Biafra war
Obioma Nnaemeka
PART IV: RE-READING TRAUMA AND DEHUMANISATION
12. Politics, narrative, and subjectivities in Fanta Régina Nacro’s The Night of Truth
Frank Ukadike
13. Crime, punishment, and retribution: The politics of sisterhood interrupted in Marie-Elena John’s Unburnable
Jennifer Thorington Springer
14. Male violence, the state and the dehumanisation of women in three South African novels by women
Naomi Nkealah
15. "Here comes the dress": Daily resistance in Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker
Mercedez L. Thompson
Biography
Naomi Nkealah is a Lecturer in English in the School of Education at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.
Obioma Nnaemeka is Chancellor’s Professor of French, Africana Studies and Women’s/Gender Studies at Indiana University, Indianapolis, USA. She is the President of the Association of African Women Scholars and CEO of the Jessie Obidiegwu Education Fund that is dedicated to the education of girls in Africa.
