| Description |
1 online resource (xii, 262 pages) |
| Series |
Women in Africa and the diaspora |
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Women in Africa and the diaspora.
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| Contents |
Machine generated contents note: Dissecting Anthills of Insurrection -- Traditional Discourses of Female Genital Excision -- Colonial and Anticolonial Discourses of Female Genital Excision -- Feminist and Human Rights Discourses of Female Genital Excision -- Postcolonial Discourses of Female Genital Excision -- Three Literary "Generations" Writing on Female Gential Excision -- ch. 1 Denunciations of Colonization and Hesitant Feminist Criticism in Early Literary "Circumscriptions" of Female Genital Excision (1963-1974) -- Excised Women's Bodies as Pamphlets of Ethnicity in the Kenyan Struggle for Independence / Likimani -- Two Exceptional Women's Alternative Gender Scripts / Njau -- First Generation: Cultural Ambassadors, Cautious Critics -- ch. 2 Growing Feminist Disenchantment in Literary Explorations of Female Genital Excision around the UN Decade for Women (1968-1988) -- Immobile Women's Moving Narratives / Maiga Ka -- Captive/ating Women Warriors / Rifaat -- Second Generation: Resistance against National and Gender Oppression -- ch. 3 Globalization of the Literary Debate on Female Genital Excision at the Close of the Twentieth Century (1982-1998) -- African American Fictionalizations of a "Culturally Challenging" Practice / Dickerson -- Cultural Complications in Fiction by Other Women of African Descent / Keita -- Third Generation: Affinities across the Diaspora ... and through Time |
| Summary |
Annotation <div>Female genital excision, or the ritual of cutting the external genitals of girls and women, is undoubtedly one of the most heavily and widely debated cultural traditions of our time. By looking at how writers of African descent have presented the practice in their literary work, Elisabeth Bekers shows how the debate on female genital excision evolved over the last four decades of the twentieth century, in response to changing attitudes about ethnicity, nationalism, colonialism, feminism, and human rights.<br /> <i>Rising Anthills</i>(the title refers to a Dogon myth) analyzes works in English, French, and Arabic by African and African American writers, both women and men, from different parts of the African continent and the diaspora. Attending closely to the nuances of language and the complexities of the issue, Bekers explores lesser-known writers side by side with such recognizable names as Ngugi wa Thiongo, Flora Nwapa, Nawal El Saadawi, Ahmadou Kourouma, Calixthe Beyala, Alice Walker, and Gloria Naylor. Following their literary discussions of female genital excision, she discerns a gradual evolutionfrom the 1960s, when writers mindful of its communal significance carefully wrote around the physical operation, through the 1970s and 1980s, when they began to speak out against the practice and their societies gender politics, to the late 1990s, when they situated their denunciations of female genital excision in a much broader, international context of womens oppression and the struggle for womens rights.</div> |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 231-248) and index |
| Notes |
English |
|
Print version record |
| Subject |
Female genital mutilation in literature
|
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TRAVEL -- Special Interest -- Literary.
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LITERARY CRITICISM -- General.
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Female genital mutilation in literature
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| LC no. |
2009041892 |
| ISBN |
9780299234935 |
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0299234932 |
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0299234940 |
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9780299234942 |
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1282622870 |
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9781282622876 |
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9786612622878 |
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6612622873 |
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