African Women Writing Resistance - An Anthology of Contemporary Voices (Paperback)

Confronting entrenched social inequality and inadequate access to resources, women across Africa are working with determination and imagination to improve their material conditions and to blaze a clear path for their daughters and granddaughters. The thirty-one African-born contributors to this book move beyond the linked dichotomies of victim/oppressor and victim/heroine to present their experiences of resistance in full complexity: they are at the forward edge of the tide of women's empowerment that, at the start of the twenty-first century, is moving across the African continent. Contributions illuminate the effect on women of women's poverty and lack of access to education, health care, credit, and political power; HIV/AIDS; female genital cutting; Sharia law; armed conflict and rape as a weapon of war; displacement and exile; women's oppressions within heterosexual relationships; resistant sexualities; intergenerational conflict and tensions between tradition and modernity.