ABSTRACT

This book investigates how the intersection between gendered violence and human rights is depicted and engaged with in Africana literature and films.

The rich and multifarious range of film and literature emanating from Africa and the diaspora provides a fascinating lens through which we can understand the complex consequences of gendered violence on the lives of women, children and minorities. Contributors to this volume examine the many ways in which gendered violence mirrors, expresses, projects and articulates the larger phenomenon of human rights violations in Africa and the African diaspora and how, in turn, the discourse of human rights informs the ways in which we articulate, interrogate, conceptualise and interpret gendered violence in literature and film. The book also shines a light on the linguistic contradictions and ambiguities in the articulation of gendered violence in private spaces and war.

This book will be essential reading for scholars, critics, feminists, teachers and students seeking solid grounding in exploring gendered violence and human rights in theory and practice.

chapter |7 pages

Introduction

Exploring the nexus between gendered violence and human rights

part I|66 pages

The language of violence in gendered spaces

chapter 2|17 pages

Gendered violence and narrative erasure

Women in Athol Fugard’s Tsotsi and Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi 1

chapter 4|18 pages

Women on the move

The construction of the woman migrant’s story in African cinema

part II|52 pages

Sexualities, cultures and exclusions

chapter 5|16 pages

“Putting her in her place!”

Gender and sexual violence in Sefi Atta’s Everything Good will Come and Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives

chapter 6|16 pages

Human rights in spaces of violence

Exploring the intersections of gender, violence and lesbian sexuality in selected African fiction by women

part III|67 pages

Subverting stories of war

chapter 8|18 pages

Women and violence on the Algerian screen

Documenting les années noires in Yasmina Bachir-Chouikh’s Rachida and Djamila Sahraoui’s Barakat! (Enough!)

chapter 9|16 pages

“A strange combination of femininity and menace”

Re-thinking the figure of the female soldier in Nadifa Mohamed’s The Orchard of Lost Souls

chapter 11|19 pages

Gendered spaces and war

Fighting and narrating the Nigeria-Biafra war

part IV|62 pages

Re-reading trauma and dehumanisation

chapter 13|13 pages

Crime, punishment and retribution

The politics of sisterhood interrupted in Marie-Elena John’s Unburnable

chapter 15|16 pages

“Here comes the dress”

Daily resistance in Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker