ABSTRACT
In Abdalla Adamu’s paper “Private Sphere, Public Wahala: Gender and Delineation of Intimisphare in Muslim Hausa Video Films,” he appropriates Habermas’s theory of the public sphere to deal “specifi cally with the sub-national issue of Muslim laws of female identity in northern Nigeria” (2006b, 6). Summarizing points made by scholars of Islam on the public sphere, Adamu notes that Kian Tajbakhsh describes the “the public sphere [as] above all a space for the ‘collective enforcement of public morals’ rather than necessarily political” (2006b, 27), while Jon Anderson similarly argues “that for well over a generation, the public sphere of Islam has been an arena of contest in which activists and militants brought forth challenges to traditional interpretive practices and authority to speak for Islam, especially to articulate its social interests and political agendas” (2003, 887). In his own analysis of Hausa society specifi cally, Adamu implies that the realm of public discourse, made up mostly of men, has been defi ned as the public sphere, whereas the private sphere is located for the most part within the interior realm of domestic space-the realm of the secluded woman. Moreover, the focus on public theory versus secret practice, when ideally women are the inhabitants of the ambiguous “secret” places, creates a tension in how to interpret the role of women and what constitutes “moral behavior.” In recent years, the focus on public morals versus private practice has been a major concern of Hausa artists in investigating exactly what the private/ public division means for Hausa modernity. After a background on the emergence of these new forms of literature, I will look at the Hausa fi lm Albashi (Salary), directed by Abbas Sadiq and produced by Zainab Idris, as a representative contribution to exploring the anxieties about gender spaces in contemporary Northern Nigeria.
