ABSTRACT
Colonialism, development, and even current so-called globalization—all processes of unequal power relations—focus more on the material and less on the human. Colonialism’s focus on natural resources, institutions, and frameworks is matched by development’s focus on economics, institutions, and processes. Globalization discourses’ tendency to totalize and dwell on abstractions—flows, time—space compression, the world in motion, et cetera—creates the picture of this monolith called the world moving. Globalization brings in its wake all sorts of anxieties inside and outside the academy. Mapping the trajectory of feminist engagement, in theory and practice, in the past half century is a study in contrasts, relatedness, and shifting boundaries—autonomy and connectedness, exclusion and the demand for inclusion, conflict and collaboration, border-crossing and intersectionality, and, more important, the expansion of horizons. Although African feminist scholars name their analytical frameworks differently and have different takes on what constitutes African feminism, they all agree that the tools for theorizing and analyzing African feminism must be grounded in local realities.
