African Women Under Fire
Literary Discourses in War and Conflict
By (author) Pauline Ada Uwakweh Contributions by Emilie Diouf, Moussa Issifou, Tendai Mangena, Nanjala Nyabola, Julie Papaioannou, Melissa R. Root, Jessie Sagawa, Paul N. Touré, Pauline Ada Uwakweh
Not available to order
Publication date:
16 March 2017Length of book:
216 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9781498529198
African writers and literary critics must account for the changing political terrain and how these contribute to creating new sources of conflicts and aggression toward women. This book brings insight and scholarly breadth to the growing research on women, war, and conflict in Africa. The aftermath of wars and conflicts initiates new forms of violence and related gender challenges. The contributors establish compelling evidence for the significance of gender in the analyses of contemporary warfare and conflict. Articulating war's consequences for women and children remains a major challenge for critics, policy makers, and human rights organizations. There is a need for deeper understanding of the new sources of violence and male aggression on women, the gendered challenges of reintegration in the aftermath, and the future consequences of gendered violence for the African continent. This book will be useful to scholars, researchers, instructors, students of literature in the humanities, women's studies, liberal studies, African studies, etc. at both undergraduate and graduate levels. It also offers interdisciplinary utility for readers interested in literary representations of women's experience in war and conflict.
Pauline Uwakweh’s edited volume brings out a fresh and equally significant perspective that focuses upon the much-needed African women’s literary responses to wars and armed conflicts. . . Pauline Uwakweh beautifully gives a critique of a patriarchy and especially literary patriarchy, while bringing war and gender issues under study. Her book demonstrates how women’s voices are missing in war literature and what can be done to overcome this lacuna. Women under Fire is certainly going to be an authentic source on literary discourse on war and conflict besides being a credible work on African literary criticism in the gender arena. Given its thick description the work is too provoking for future researchers not to go further and deeper into the themes touched upon. Throughout the chapters there been an intellectual engagement with various socio-literary themes bringing out various war realities especially the gendered relations and power play between them. This work can indeed be called Pauline Uwakweh’s and her fellow coauthors’ labor of love.