Tubman Talks Roundtable: The Possibilities and Constraints of Researching and Writing about African Women (Hybrid)
Abstract:
Studies focusing on the lives and experiences of African women have been central to the formation and advancement of African Studies. Scholars have compellingly demonstrated that the focus on African women’s lives and actions opens up new fields of inquiry and complicate dominant, and usually androcentric, frameworks and understandings of the African past, present and future. Yet despite the critical and new insights scholarship on African women has brought to African Studies, the cannon continues to categorize the field as a sub-field or separate from mainstream foci. This dominant male-centered framing continues to inform the conceptual framing about African women, which obscures African women’s ways of knowing or co-opts inquiries about African women to advance and replicate masculinist inquiries. In addition to these challenges, the scarcity of resources, particularly documentary resources, on African women and the colonial and androcentric nature of many of the sources further makes it challenging to write and research about African women. To understand the evolution and future of African Studies, the participants of this roundtable will explore the various possibilities and constraints of researching and writing about African women by drawing on their individual research focus and experiences. They will discuss the research methodologies they bring to bear on a variety of sources contained in established and less known archives and advance the need to establish new archives and methodologies to deepen knowledge about African women and relatedly African Studies.
Bios:
Rose Ndengue is a Socio-historian and political scientist, Cameroonian scholar-activist, who defines herself as a black feminist from the transatlantic space, straddling Africa, Europe and the Americas. She is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Global studies at Glendon, York University, where she is developing a teaching program in African Studies and Black feminisms, from postcolonial and decolonial frameworks. Her research focuses on gender and politics in Africa and in the diasporas, in colonial and post-colonial contexts, with a particular emphasis on African and Afrodescendant women's mobilizations in Cameroonian and French contexts. She is currently working on book project in French entitled : (In)civilités Subalternes : Les mobilisations des Camerounaises et la pensée féministe noire.
Vanessa S. Oliveira is an Associate Professor of African history in the Department of History at the Royal Military College of Canada, Kingston. She teaches courses on European colonialism, women and gender, research methodology, and early and modern Africa. Her research interests include slavery, slave trading, the transition to legitimate commerce in tropical commodities, and women merchants. She has published numerous journal articles and book chapters in both Portuguese and English. Her book Slave Trade and Abolition: Gender, Commerce and Economic Transition in Luanda was published in 2021 by the University of Wisconsin Press.
Husseina Dinani is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Historical and Cultural Studies and Global Development Studies at University of Toronto Scarborough. At UTSC, Husseina teaches undergraduate courses in History, Women's and Gender Studies, African Studies and International Development Studies. Husseina is currently preparing a book manuscript, tentatively entitled, "Women of the Colony: Gender and Resourcefulness in southeastern Tanzania." The manuscript examines the decolonization period in southeastern Tanzania from the perspectives of gender and rural women. She has published aspects of this research in the International Journal of African Historical Studies and Gender & History. Husseina's research interests also focus on labour and the colonial state in Tanzania and East African South Asians in Tanzania and Canada.
Annie Bunting is a Professor of Law & Society and York Research Chair in International Gender Justice & Peacebuilding. Her research includes socio-legal studies of marriage and childhoods, feminist international law, and culture, religion and law. From 2010-2022, she directed an international research collaboration (SSHRC-funded Partnership 2015-2022) called Conjugal Slavery in War: Partnership for the study of enslavement, marriage and masculinities with historians of slavery, community-based researchers and women’s human rights scholars. She is the co-editor of Marriage by Force? Contestation over Consent and Coercion in Africa (Ohio Univ. Press, 2016) with Benjamin Lawrance and Richard Roberts; Contemporary Slavery: Popular Rhetoric and Political Practice (Univ. of British Columbia Press, 2017; Cornell Univ. Press, 2018) with Joel Quirk; and Research as more than extraction: Knowledge production and sexual violence in post conflict African societies (Ohio Univ. Press, 2023) with Allen Kiconco and Joel Quirk.