This landmark collection of newly commissioned essays explores how diverse women of African descent have practiced religion as part of the work of their ordinary and sometimes extraordinary lives. By examining women from North America, the Caribbean, Brazil, and Africa, the contributors identify the patterns that emerge as women, religion, and diaspora intersect, mapping fresh approaches to this emergent field of inquiry. The volume focuses on issues of history, tradition, and the authenticity of African-derived spiritual practices in a variety of contexts, including those where memories of suffering remain fresh and powerful. The contributors discuss matters of power and leadership and of religious expressions outside of institutional settings. The essays study women of Christian denominations, African and Afro-Caribbean traditions, and Islam, addressing their roles as spiritual leaders, artists and musicians, preachers, and participants in bible-study groups. This volume's transnational mixture, along with its use of creative analytical approaches, challenges existing paradigms and summons new models for studying women, religions, and diasporic shiftings across time and space.

"This book examines fictional works by women authors who have left their homes in West Africa and now live as members of the diaspora. In recent years a compelling array of critically acclaimed fiction by women in the West African diaspora has shifted the direction of the African novel away from post-colonial themes of nationhood, decolonization and cultural authenticity, and towards explorations of the fluid and shifting constructions of identity in transnational spaces. Drawing on works by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Buchi Emecheta, Ama Ata Aidoo, Sefi Atta, Chika Unigwe and Taiye Selasie, this book interrogates the ways in which African diaspora women's fiction portrays the realities of otherness, hybridity and marginalized existence of female subjects beyond Africa's borders. Overall, the book demonstrates that life in the diaspora is an uncharted journey of expanded opportunities along with paradoxical realities of otherness. Providing a vivid and composite portrait of African women's experiences in the diasporic landscape, this book will be of interest to researchers of migration and diaspora topics, and African, women's and world literature"--

Representation and Resistance: South Asian and African Women's Texts at Home and in the Diaspora compares colonial and national constructions of gender identity in Western-educated African and South Asian women's texts. Jaspal Kaur Singh argues that, while some writers conceptualize women's equality in terms of educational and professional opportunity, sexual liberation, and individualism, others recognize the limitations of a paradigm of liberation that focuses only on individual freedom. Certain diasporic artists and writers assert that transformation of gender identity construction occurs, but only in transnational cultural spaces of the first world-spaces which have emerged in an era of rampant globalization and market liberalism. In particular, Singh advocates the inclusion of texts from women of different classes, religions, and castes, both in the Global North and in the South.

Featuring contributions from some of the most accomplished scholars on the topic, Holding the World Together explores the rich and varied ways in which women have wielded power across the African continent, from the precolonial period to the present. Suitable for classroom use, this comprehensive volume considers such topics as the representation of African women, their role in national liberation movements, their experiences of religious fundamentalism (both Christian and Muslim), their incorporation into the world economy, changing family and marriage systems, impacts of the world economy on their lives and livelihoods, and the unique challenges they face in the areas of health and disease. Contributors: Nwando Achebe, Ousseina Alidou, Signe Arnfred, Andrea L. Arrington-Sirois, Henryatta Ballah, Teresa Barnes, Josephine Beoku-Betts, Emily Burril, Abena P. A. Busia, Gracia Clark, Alicia Decker, Karen Flint, December Green, Cajetan Iheka, Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Elizabeth M. Perego, Claire Robertson, Kathleen Sheldon, Aili Mari Tripp, Cassandra Veney

Throughout West African societies, at times of social crises, postmenopausal women—the Mothers—make a ritual appeal to their innate moral authority. The seat of this power is the female genitalia. Wielding branches or pestles, they strip naked and slap their genitals and bare breasts to curse and expel the forces of evil. In An Intimate Rebuke Laura S. Grillo draws on fieldwork in Côte d’Ivoire that spans three decades to illustrate how these rituals of Female Genital Power (FGP) constitute religious and political responses to abuses of power. When deployed in secret, FGP operates as spiritual warfare against witchcraft; in public, it serves as a political activism. During Côte d’Ivoire’s civil wars FGP challenged the immoral forces of both rebels and the state. Grillo shows how the ritual potency of the Mothers’ nudity and the conjuration of their sex embodies a moral power that has been foundational to West African civilization. Highlighting the remarkable continuity of the practice across centuries while foregrounding the timeliness of FGP in contemporary political resistance, Grillo shifts perspectives on West African history, ethnography, comparative religious studies, and postcolonial studies.

This book examines fictional works by women authors who have left their homes in West Africa and now live as members of the diaspora. In recent years a compelling array of critically acclaimed fiction by women in the West African diaspora has shifted the direction of the African novel away from post-colonial themes of nationhood, decolonization and cultural authenticity, and towards explorations of the fluid and shifting constructions of identity in transnational spaces. Drawing on works by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Buchi Emecheta, Ama Ata Aidoo, Sefi Atta, Chika Unigwe and Taiye Selasie, this book interrogates the ways in which African diaspora women’s fiction portrays the realities of otherness, hybridity and marginalized existence of female subjects beyond Africa’s borders. Overall, the book demonstrates that life in the diaspora is an uncharted journey of expanded opportunities along with paradoxical realities of otherness. Providing a vivid and composite portrait of African women’s experiences in the diasporic landscape, this book will be of interest to researchers of migration and diaspora topics, and African, women’s and world literature.

This work is the first comprehensive history of the Lebanese migrant communities of colonial French West Africa, a vast expanse that covered present-day Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, Guinea, Benin and Mauritania. Where others have concentrated on the commercial activities of these migrants, casting them as archetypal middlemen, this work reconstructs not just their economic strategies, but also their social and political lives. Moreover, it examines the fraught responses of colonial Frenchmen to the unsettling presence of these interlopers of empire--responses which, with their echoes of metropolitan racism, helped to shape the ways in which Lebanese migrants represented themselves and justified their place in West Africa. This is a work which attempts not just to reshape broader understandings of diasporic life-of Janus-like existences lived in transit between distant locales, and de- pendent on the constant to-and-fro of people, news, and goods--but also to challenge the way we think about empires, and the relations between their constituent territories and diverse inhabitants.