In the sea of memory : embodiment and agency in the black diaspora

This thesis is a sustained meditation on the relationship between embodiment, memory and cultural creativity in the black diaspora. It seeks to generate a theoretical vocabulary outside the stale polarisation between essentialism and anti-essentialism. Using the phenomenology of lived experience, I contend that black diasporic memory and identity are actively constructed within each present. I argue that bodily expression is part of a broader set of cultural strategies of self-definition, self-maintenance and self-preservation. In the case of the black diaspora, the past is evoked, invoked and provoked into existence once again through each expression of embodiment. A key concern in the thesis is therefore to highlight the active capacity of the body to recreate its world and in the process empower, renew and re-orient itself in the face of adversity and oppression. Rather than succumb to an account of black diasporicity as either a history of pain or the background of cultural hybridity, I argue that the pleasures and pains of black diasporicity are different aspects of the same ongoing phenomenon. Through the example of Jamaican dancehall culture, I show how the adorned, transgressive dancing body of dancehall women creates a dynamic of eroticised autonomy in an otherwise hostile environment. In sum, my thesis provides an analysis of the dynamics of diasporic identity and the antiphonies of continuity and discontinuity

Feminist book publishing today

In this piece, Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, publisher of Cassava Republic Press based in Abuja (Nigeria) and London (UK), discusses with Simidele Dosekun her founding and continued visions for the press, how these translate into the daily management and operations of the business, and the opportunities and challenges publishing presents for feminist, Black and African political purposes, including transnationally. We also discuss what it means to run and brand a feminist business in a contemporary cultural climate in which feminism is said to be ‘popular’

Introduction: the legacies and limits of the body in pain

Since its publication in 1985, Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain has become a seminal text in the study of embodiment. In its foregrounding of the body in war and torture, it critiques the minimising of the body in questions of politics, offering a compelling account of the structure and phenomenology of violent domination. However, at the same time the text can be seen to shore up a mind/body dualism that has been associated with oppressive forms of gendering, racialisation and disablement. Divisive, powerful and elegant, the text has been central in the shaping of approaches to embodiment over the past 30 years. This special issue revisits Scarry's text in the light of 30 years of scholarship on embodiment and the body. Its legacies and limits are exemplified through a series of articles that mobilise the arguments of The Body in Pain even as they push at the limits of the text

What’s Gendered about Gender-Based Violence? An Empirically Grounded Theoretical Exploration from Tanzania

Violence is often considered gendered on the basis that it is violence against women. This assumption is evident both in “gender-based violence” interventions in Africa and in the argument that gender is irrelevant if violence is also perpetrated against men. This article examines the relation of partner violence not to biological sex, but to gender as conceptualized in feminist theory. It theorizes the role of gender as an analytical category in dominant social meanings of “wifebeating” in Tanzania by analyzing arguments for and against wife-beating expressed in 27 focus group discussions in the Arumeru and Kigoma-Vijijini districts. The normative ideal of a “good beating” emerges from these data as one that is supported by dominant social norms and cyclically intertwined with “doing gender.” The author shows how the good beating supports, and is in turn supported by, norms that hold people accountable to their sex category. These hegemonic gender norms prescribe the performance of masculinity and femininity, power relations of inequality, and concrete material exploitation of women’s agricultural and domestic labor. The study has implications for policy and practice in interventions against violence, and suggests untapped potential in theoretically informed feminist research for understanding local power relations in the Global South