Bọlanle Awẹ: The Matriarch of Feminist History

At the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the founding of the University of Ibadan, famous historian, Professor Bọlanle Awẹ was conferred with a well-deserved honorary doctorate degree. For both Professor Awẹ and even Nigeria’s premier university, this great honor is a fitting tribute to mark the anniversary of the institution of learning that has been central to the intellectual history of Nigeria. The University of Ibadan has done well to select Professor Awẹ for this honor. Her earnestness and intelligence are beyond doubts. There is no gainsaying disputing her warmth, her magnetism. I have known her since the 1970s—she remains consistent in the exhibition of positive values, in the promotion of Yoruba culture, and the advancement of the scholarly enterprise.

Dalit Women’s Narratives on Sexual Violence: Reflections on Indian Society and State

Sexual violence generally leaves a mark on historical records only if such incidents come to trial. Today’s experience suggests that only a fraction of such cases have ever reached the courts in the past; and even in those cases, the evidence that survives is far from the whole story. This neglect reflects the way sexual violence against women has been so easily waved aside, mainly by men, as a marginal event, a private catastrophe doubtless, but one of little historical significance for such criminals have been generally considered as sex maniacs. Also, ingrained misogynistic caricaturing of women has always allowed people to trivialise rape and render it titillating to pornographic imagination. It is therefore suggested that such stereotypes in turn infect the way men have written history. A major achievement of feminist history, particularly in the post-structuralist debate, has been to end this neglect and challenge this trivialisation. Drawing upon post-structuralist feminists and Indian writings, this study examines sexual violence that forms a common theme in the daily lives of numerous dalit women in India.

Woolf and Suffrage

In Night and Day and The Years, Woolf employs the figure of the suffragist/suffragette to think through problems of feminist history and to imagine feminism’s temporality. Extending work by Sowon Park, Naomi Black, and Clara Jones on Woolf’s relation to the suffrage movement, this chapter places Woolf’s novelistic meditations on suffrage in close dialogue with Elizabeth Robins’s earlier movement novel, The Convert, in order to explore what Woolf can offer us in a rereading of the suffrage archive. Woolf’s careful assessment of movement feminism, and even her ambivalence regarding her activist heroines, invites us to notice complexity, and even ambivalence, in the work of her feminist precursor.

Book review: Geraldine Forbes, Lost Letters and Feminist History: The Political Friendship of Mohandas K. Gandhi and Sarala Devi Chaudhurani

Geraldine Forbes, Lost Letters and Feminist History: The Political Friendship of Mohandas K. Gandhi and Sarala Devi Chaudhurani. Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2020, 170 pp., ₹595 (paperback).

Medusa: How the Literary Muse Became an Emblem for Feminism

From Ancient Greece to Hollywood, Medusa has been a global narrative. This article explores poetry and storytelling through the historical and literary legacy of Medusa; it argues for her importance in feminist history and her continued relevance in our post-MeToo world. While a seemingly straightforward tale, Medusa's story explores female dynamics, feminist power against patriarchal forces, and the ultimate defense against the male gaze. This paper showcases a historical account of the handling of the Medusa myth which proves that the rewriting and reclaiming of the myth by women parallels, if not contributes to the success of female empowerment. Accompanying this paper is a poetry collection that explores varying perspectives within rape culture, including the sexualization of Billie Eilish.

Old-Age Justice and Black Feminist History

This essay outlines Sojourner Truth’s and Harriet Tubman’s articulations of an intersectional black feminist agenda for old-age justice. The two most famous formerly enslaved women in the nineteenth-century United States, Truth and Tubman in their speeches, activism, and published Narratives revealed the mechanisms of domination through which enslavers and employers of domestic servants extracted productive and reproductive labor from black women, who in turn faced premature debility and immiseration at the end of life. Truth and Tubman linked what is now called necropolitics—“subjugation of life to the power of death,” in Achille Mbembe’s phrase—to the coercive organization of care work, what Evelyn Nakano Glenn refers to as being “forced to care.” They point to the importance of gendered and racialized labor to the history of old age in America.