Soro-Soke Polemic & the contemporary African Female Revolutionary Trend: An Ngugian Perspective

A video revealing the assault of two men who were pulled out of a hotel and the execution of one of them by the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) became viral on October 4, 2020 spurring random protests across Nigeria. The protests which began as pockets of pickets snowballed into crowded rallies in the major cities comprising mainly, the youth shortly after the outbreak of a virtual protest with the hashtag #EndSARS littering the social media, and eventually, the print media, and banners. Christened, Soro-Soke, these protests can be linked with a certain history - the actuality of the #EndSARS protests against police brutality by Nigerians must have been predicted three decades ago by Ngugi wa Thiong’o whose late fictions prophesy palpable female intolerance of government ineptitude and a growing female revolutionary tendency in Africa; a fervor which is spread from Kenya through the entire continent. Ngugi’s present affinity to strong female characters can be regarded as archetypal of his late fictions and nonfictions published from the 1980s. Matigari, Wizard of the Crow and Devil on Cross will be interrogated as predictions of the #EndSARS protests from an Ngugian perspective, while Ngugi’s strongest nonfiction heroine, Me Katilili in his 2018 nonfiction, Wrestling with the Devil: A Prison Memoir will be synchronically analyzed alongside his imaginary heroines. Cultural Ecofeminism and Jungian Theory of archetypes interrogate the roles assigned by nature to Ngugi’s most outstanding women in his late fictions, as part of a collective unconscious which is urgently typical of mankind.

FEMINISM AND DISSIDENT FEMININITY IN POPULAR CULTURE. CHER’S ROLE AND THE ROLE OF RELIGION IN MOONSTRUCK

When looking at representations of women, one is faced with the way such representations were conditioned by the prevailing mentality of a particular age, that is to say, how they were ‘framed’ by it. In this article we start by carefully looking at how, in spite of having had frames imposed on them in a constraining way, women have successfully resisted and reworked them, shockingly catapulting traditional iconography to a new sphere; namely popular icons. A ‘damsel in distress’ is, definitely, a ‘framed’ woman. She has been, throughout history, a common archetype in myth. Always helpless, she is in need of being rescued by a male figure; an idea that must have done wonders to the egos of male writers and readers alike. For that reason, we will be looking at ‘damsels in distress’ along history. More specifically, we apply the notion of frame to representations of gender and explore how popular culture is frequently capable of ‘unframing’ those representations. Our case study is the 1987 post classical romantic comedy Moonstruck an intersemiotic and intertextual product with traces of both Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and Puccini’s opera La Bohème, three stories in which ‘damsels in distress’ play the main role in the plot in order to deconstruct the above mentioned stereotype of ‘the damsel’ with the ‘help’ of strong female characters, one of them being Loretta, the character played by Cher.

Emecheta, Buchi

Buchi Emecheta (1944–2017) was a Nigerian writer, born in Lagos to a seamstress mother and a railway worker father. Emecheta’s early ambition was to get an education, like her brother Adolphus. Orphaned early in life, a scholarship to a coveted high school gave her the opportunity she wanted. Married at sixteen to Sylvester Onwordi, she joined him in London in 1962. Their marriage soon ended because of Onwordi’s physical and mental abuse. By the age of twenty two, she was a single mother with five children. Her first novel, In the Ditch, published in 1972, chronicled the struggles of Adah, who represented Emecheta’s own alter ego, in raising children in the slums of London. Overall, Emecheta published over twenty books, which frequently centered on a black woman’s experience. Many of her novels revisit the same themes and draw inspiration from her life. There is perhaps no other African writer in whose works their own biography is centered as much as it is in hers. Her work illuminates her life while her life informs her work. Her life and fiction feed one another to the extent that her novels are often referred to as “fictionalized” accounts of her life. Although Emecheta was a symbol of the modern African woman, she rejected being called a feminist. If she were to be called a feminist, it had to be “feminist with a small letter ‘f’.” A term she would have accepted for herself as well as for her strong female characters would have been Obioma Nnaemeka’s “nego-feminism,” a feminism of Africa, of negotiation, and a no ego feminism.

Exploitation, Victimhood, and Gendered Performance in Rituparno Ghosh's Bariwali

This article analyzes Rituparno Ghosh's celebrated film Bariwali (The Lady of the House, 2000). The film marks the beginnings of Ghosh's treatment of gender and sexual politics. Ghosh's earlier films Unishe April (1994) and Dahan (1997) engaged with strong female characters, but Bariwali is the first of his films to narrate the various ways in which female agency is routed through male exploitation and patriarchy. Through close readings of the characters and the visual tropes perspicaciously crafted by Ghosh, this article positions hegemonic masculinity and heteropatriarchal privilege as the exploiter within India's gendered politics. By placing the protagonist Banalata both within the feudal space as well as within the bhadralok discourse, one can trace the transition from tradition to modernity that the story represents, and in turn trace Ghosh's unique understanding of and reaction against India's prevailing social and cultural norms.

The Princess and the Poor Self-Image: An Analysis of Newbery Medal Winners for Gender Bias and Female Underrepresentation Leading into the Twenty-First Century

This study analyzes how 12 recent (2000-2011) Newbery Medal-winning books represent gender. The study counts how many of the books’ characters represent progressive or traditional gender roles, how many male and female characters represent each character category (protagonist, antagonist, major, and minor), how many strong female characters are accepted or rejected by their peers, how many characters hold stereotypical gender beliefs about themselves or their peers, and how many works contain balanced feminist perspectives. The study finds equitable female representation, but the study also finds a bias toward traditional male stereotypes. The results indicate a general acceptance of strong female characters and a balanced representation of females, regardless of a historical fiction classification. These results suggest that characters in Newbery Medal-winning books represent gender more equally and less stereotypically compared to characters in works of earlier decades.

Gender and Irony in The Early Modern English Romance

The paper discusses the ironic manner in which gender relations are often tackled in the early modern English romance, from Shakespeare’s comedies to Sidney’s pastorals or Lady Mary Wroth’s poetry. Strong female characters, effeminate males and the subversive, often ambiguous, manner in which the theme of love is approached in 16th- and 17th - century English literature are some of the aspects to be discussed.

Feisty Females: Using Children's Literature with Strong Female Characters

Girls enter school more mathematics ready than boys. By the time they graduate from high school, however, females have been outdistanced by males in the number of higher-level mathematics courses taken and in the results of crucial tests, such as the mathematics portion of the Scholastic Achievement Test (American Association of University Women 1991). They are also much less likely to pursue majors and careers that relate to mathematics.