Reading List: Barbara Boswell
While editing a collection of the writings of South African feminist Lauretta Ngcobo, Barbara Boswell found inspiration in texts that reflected Ngcobo’s sense that writing is an exercise of freedom.
Women
A worldly Nubian energy
The music and art of Lauryn Hill and Chiwoniso Maraire combined sexiness with political consciousness, offering Black women a way out of rigid categorization.
No compromises
In a country as diverse and divided as Sudan, who gets to define women’s rights and struggles?
Cut out of society
African women en route to Europe often land up stuck in Morocco, taking on precarious work as hairdressers and beauticians.
Emancipation that costs servitude
Filmmaker Khady Sylla amplifies the voices of and gives visibility to the domestic workers tending to the homes of Africa’s middle classes.
Where the spirits conquer her
The Senegalese director, Safi Faye’s classic 1996 film, Mossane, is a love tragedy and a spiritual quest in Sereer land.
Taper salam
For African women passing through Morocco en route to Europe, begging on the streets becomes a way to support themselves, but also reinforces humiliation and shame.
A picture’s worth
Mabel Cetu is considered South Africa's first Black woman photojournalist and documented the everyday lives of Black communities in the 1950s.
The land doesn’t lie
Safi Faye's 1976 film, 'A Farmer's Love Letter,' exposes the gap between the post-colonial state and the concerns of ordinary people.
To create or to perish
The last film of underappreciated Senegalese director, Khady Sylla dealt with mental health. It is worth revisiting it now for its groundbreaking portrayal of depression suffered by two women friends.
Mothers and mothering
Director Alice Diop’s 'Saint Omer' is preoccupied with what binds women together, the traumas that are inherited, shared and possibly overcome.
After we have grown too tired of jumping
The Ghanaian game, Ampe, is an education in Blackness and womanhood.
Between East Africa and the Gulf
Political encounters between the Arab Gulf and Africa span centuries. Mahmud Traouri's novel 'Maymuna' demonstrates the significant role of a woman’s journey from East Africa to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
The journey of a thousand steps
How might refugee as well as forced migration studies benefit from the movement to decolonize all aspects of African Studies?
En route to the unknown
African women exercise their right to migrate, but also face dilemmas on their way to the unknown. We need policies that protect them.
At the border, on the margins
African migrant women are exposed to intersectional systems of violence but are not simply victims.
The quiet violence of child maintenance
Humiliation and stigma are companions for women seeking assistance from courts to obtain maintenance in South Africa.
Afrobeat is bigger than Fela
In the second of five articles on Afrobeat music in South America, political scientist Simon Akindes writes about the all women and nonbinary Brazilian band, Funmilayo Afrobeat Orquestra.
The beginning is always the body
The artist, Frida Orupabo, explores the social world around her via her large collages. Curator, Elvira Dyangani Ose, spoke to her about her work.
Guinean first ladies and big (political) business
The wives of (former) heads of state form an important part of the political elite in Guinea, considerably shaping the country’s sociopolitical and economic past and present.