Birthing Resistance: Ethical Decision-Making, Discomfort and Adaptability in Afro-Feminist, Womanist and Intersectional Readings of Exodus 1:15–22

Can we begin at the beginning? Or maybe we must enter midstream, in medias res? In any case, let us continue with our story —“When something big like that night happens,” says the narrator of Animal’s People (2007), “time divides into before and after, the before time breaks up into dreams, the dreams dissolve into darkness. That’s how it is here.”1 The tragedy to which Animal, the narrator of Indra Sinha’s novel, refers is the 1984 gas leak at the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, India. It is the cause of his spina bifida and leaves him walking on all fours. Throughout the novel, Animal grapples not just with the physical and bodily effects of the disaster, but also with its temporal ramifications. The event is so decisive that it fractures time itself in two: there is time before the toxic gas leak and there is time after the leak. The people of Khaufpur gradually start to lose their sense of history; at first the “before time” turns blurry and intangible, and then becomes completely inaccessible, “dissolv[ing] into darkness.” Elsewhere in the text, we learn that Animal and his loved ones have been forced into a kind of stasis, stuck in time as a result of the ongoing bodily and environmental harms from the poisons of “that night,” and a slow-moving juridical process that gradually extinguishes all hopes of reparation. Part of Animal’s challenge, then, is to learn to inhabit time differently. He has to reorient his sense of himself as “animal” (a childhood slur about his disability) and dare to imagine an alternate, more ethical present and future.If time is a medium that carries our stories, then how do we change our place in it? What would it mean to reorient ourselves in time?“Whore!” “Whore! Whore! Whore!” These are the first words you hear in Anamika Haksar’s genre-defying film, Ghode ko Jalebi Khilane Le Ja Riya Hoon (Taking the Horse to Eat Jalebis, 2018; henceforth Ghode). The words are spoken by unseen women, in high-pitched voices that get more frantic and accusatory with each iteration. This aural track of abusive speech is overlaid on visuals of a choked drain in the back alleys of Delhi’s Old City. The camera follows the slow drip-drip of water from a leaky community tap as it flows into an uncovered drain and mingles with sewage and slime, the accumulated urban refuse of lives lived on the margins of a big city. As the opening sequence continues, the camera rises up from drain-level to present a sweeping aerial view of the sleeping bodies of male wage laborers, fast asleep on wooden handcarts and cement pavements. These are the places and implements of their informal everyday labor. In the next seconds, Haksar takes us from the distance of the aerial view and drops us inside the surreal dreamworlds of the exhausted sleepers. Through an irreverent mix of extreme documentary realism and fantastic animation, we experience the contradictory dreams of these tired humans as they move between visions of proletarian revolution and divine beneficence. One man is visited by the Goddess Lakshmi who showers him with wealth, while another sees a united front of workers heartily singing “The Internationale.” Two different utopian visions for the future collide here, rather uneasily. Our own disorientation, as viewers, is heightened when we remember the voices of the women who shout shrilly, “Whore!” For beneath the struggle for work and rest, behind the conflict between capital and labor, are unspoken stories of gendered violence and misogyny. The city resonates with a quiet buzz, a volley of words that spell “woman,” but sound like fear.****When we—that is, Pavitra and Debashree—sat down to articulate our understanding of a decolonial and feminist media studies, we knew that we were entering a conversation that had long been underway. Anticolonial movements of the twentieth century ousted powerful and globe-spanning modern empires. Postcolonial and decolonial theories helped us understand the epistemic violence that made the material extraction of colonialism possible. They cautioned us that colonialism looked different in different parts of the world, used different weapons, and had different avatars in the present.Moreover, the year was 2020 and we were writing from the United States of America. We were witnessing a popular movement of racial reckoning even as it unfolded in the middle of a devastating global pandemic.2 No doubt we were buoyed by the energy of mass protest, but were also alert to the many gendered forms of racialized and right-wing tyrannies that were gaining momentum under the cover of pandemic lockdowns across the globe. We wanted to take seriously the recurring calls to “Decolonize!” resonating across our multiple locations. This is what we said in our initial call for papers: “2020 has been a year of many reckonings. With this CFP we invite reflections on media that build on one of the most urgent calls currently resonating across the globe: the call to decolonize. Echoing loudly on our streets, our screens, and our classrooms, this is a call to dismantle structures of racial capitalism, carcerality, Brahminical patriarchy, ecological extraction, and the global division of gendered labor, all of which are interconnected systems that consolidate racial-capitalist power around the world.” Clearly, the enemies were powerful and the struggle would be long.As we send this issue to press, we do not offer any programmatic solutions or universal prescriptions. We prefer the provisional and the specific. Not a formula that will help achieve decolonization, once and for all, but anthems that can sustain us all in an ongoing collective struggle. As many of the authors in this issue observe, the work of decolonization does not end at a definite historical milestone, and calls to decolonize become defanged when they are appropriated by the very institutions we seek to challenge. The struggle against the colonization of our minds and bodies and lands is ongoing. That is, colonialism has not ended—not just because there remain many parts of the world ruled by “external” powers, but also because many of the epistemological, temporal, and indeed mediatic infrastructures that carry our bodies, desires, and nightmares, continue to be racist, casteist, sexist, Islamophobic, anti-poor, or otherwise extractive. The task of the feminist media scholar, then, is to enter the struggle midstream and try to make sense of the different currents that make up the turbulence.The two media artifacts we began with are appropriately slippery and challenging texts that do some of the anthemic work this issue seeks. Provisional and provocative, tragic but not elegiac, the novel and the film both embrace the power of storytelling and the practice of the imagination as the raw material from which to build just futures. Like Sinha’s novel, Haksar’s film homes in on the constant ontological, material, and epistemological struggles of those whose lives are marked by violence and oppression. The classic colonial encounter between white colonizer and racialized native is updated for the present as both novel and film grapple with the depredations wrought by local hierarchies (of gender, caste, religion, and nation, for example) and neoliberal economic imperatives, as they intersect with, and extend, colonial structures. Sinha’s protagonist-narrator Animal resists making himself legible and palatable to his Western readers, the greedy Eyes to whom he addresses his foul-mouthed, tape-recorded narrative, and to Elli Barber, the naive and altruistic American doctor, with whom he strikes up an unequal friendship.3 His solution is not unlike that of Patru in Ghode (played by Ravindra Sahu), who decides to appropriate the commercially lucrative urban form of the heritage “walking tour.” By exposing middle- and upper-class Indian tourists to the liminal lives and grotesque realities of urban spaces that are carefully veiled from mainstream view, Patru forces fellow Delhiites and experience-hungry foreign tourists to reckon equally with the poverty and pleasures of his daily life. Animal’s People and Ghode are both set many decades after the end of British colonial rule in India, but through this temporal distance they demonstrate the ongoing nature of capitalist, sexist, and state-sponsored extraction. In the face of these crushing structures, the subaltern protagonists find ever more imaginative ways to keep on keeping on.What might a decolonial “keeping on” look like, particularly for feminist scholars of media?For us, “decolonial” is a term to describe an active process, not the marker of a particular historical epoch that has passed but an active, evolving set of strategies. This process must be at once materially and conceptually transformative.4 We conceive of the decolonial as a strategic “orientation device,” to borrow a phrase from Sara Ahmed, one that shifts our ways of looking at, and living in, the world. Orientation, Ahmed explains, is a fundamentally relational concept: “Orientations shape not only how we inhabit space, but how we apprehend the world of shared inhabitance, as well as ‘who’ and ‘what’ we direct our energy and attention toward.”5 We are always oriented toward and around something other than ourselves; the challenge is to look anew at both that other and at the relations of power that define our orientation. How do we position ourselves within an existing field of thought, a discipline, vis-à-vis our “objects” of study, even as we think carefully about our relations with each other as feminists engaged in the historical study of media? Decolonial as disciplinary reorientation urges greater reflexivity, an accounting of privilege, a defamiliarizing and dismantling of our usual intellectual and disciplinary “habits.”6For film and media studies, some of these habits would include assumptions that theory is written from the unnamed West while case studies emerge from the rest of the world. Or that we can teach courses on Film Language, History of Documentary, or Media Theory without acknowledging the rich and varied scholarship on these topics that pertain to the postcolonial world or that are being produced in the Global South. Both these habits might partially stem from the same problem: an assumption that every medium has certain fixed aesthetic, industrial, and technological features that make the medium unique and make the principles of its study universal. A decolonial reorientation to a medium like cinema, for example, would insist on historical and geographical specificity, and it would shift the focus from the oft-repeated question “What is cinema?” to “What does cinema do?”7 Cinema is a relational form, located at the intersection of multiple vectors such as commerce, labor, affect, technological change, representational politics, screening conditions, and much more. If we think of cinema itself as a process, something that continually shifts in form and address, we will no longer be able to present histories of the medium as if there were only one narrative trajectory to pursue. In fact, we will have to acknowledge that instead of the history of cinema, the world has always accommodated many histories of cinema.Crucially, we do not mean to suggest that these multiple media histories are incommensurable or self-contained. To stay with the example of cinema: We know that as motion picture technologies started to proliferate across the globe in the late nineteenth century, cinema was invented and reinvented at various sites in conjunction with locally existing cultural forms, commercial exigencies, visual traditions, and the transnational circulation of mechanically reproduced images. Rather than argue for a culturally peculiar and untranslatable discrete object called “Indian cinema,” for instance, we call for a recognition of contextual specificity and colonial-capitalist economies of film trade. We reiterate what Aimé Césaire, Edward Said, and others have said before us: that the opulently violent encounter between colonizer and colonized created a historical bond that radically shaped and transformed all sides of the encounter. Hollywood cinema, born in a neo-imperialist settler colony, was as marked by coloniality as was Mexican cinema, or Filipino cinema, or Pakistani cinema. In fact, we might adapt an English saying from the days of the Orient Express to ask, “What do they know of cinema, who only Hollywood cinema know?”8These are not new concerns. These are issues that Indigenous and native scholars, critical race theorists, women-of-color and transnational feminists, and a host of others “theor[izing] from the margins” have been raising for decades.9 What the decolonial as a category does for us now is reinvigorate and reframe those debates for this historical moment. If we take seriously the challenges posed by feminist theorists of the decolonial (and its affiliated terms), then we must ask more “demanding” questions of our epistemological frameworks, our methodologies, our canons, the very limits of what we study when we study society, technology, and representation.10 Thus, the decolonial reorients us as theorists and practitioners of media, allowing us to approach longstanding scholarly debates as well as more recent struggles for social justice, in and outside the academy, from a different vantage point.Decolonial feminist media studies, as we imagine it, can accommodate artistic engagements with archives of slavery and indenture; media industry studies that acknowledges the gendered and racialized division of labor across local and global industrial networks; work on ecology and elemental media that critiques the colonial-modern separation of nature and culture; representational histories that offer a counter-canon of feminist praxis and antiracist solidarity; and decolonial approaches to archives and digitization.In all of this, a reorientation to the past, disciplinary and otherwise, is critical. Whether it inspires imaginative storytelling, embodied memory-making, feminist historiography, or some other mode of approaching the past, the decolonial as orientation device enjoins us to stay alert to the inequities of the past as well the imbalances of power within decolonial alliances. At the recent online conference on Dismantling Global Hindutva, which was viciously trolled by right-wing Hindu nationalists in the diaspora, Meena Kandaswamy, a feminist anti-caste activist and writer, quipped that “postcolonial theory has been stretched as jelly,” and indeed, as scholars from South Asia we want to underline this caution.11 Here, we find a salutary lesson in appropriations of the slogan “Decolonize this!” in the Indian context—appropriations that emphasize selective notions of indigeneity as the locus of nationalist essence. The recent episode of Walter Mignolo’s (inadvertent) endorsement of a book that furthers majoritarian and casteist theories of a pre-colonial “Hindu India” has led to a productive conversation about the dangers of stretching the meaning of decolonization “as jelly,” and we are reminded that nativism and cultural triumphalism are themselves implicated in the “coloniality of power.”12The theft of decolonial discourse toward a muscular and masculinist nationalism is even more troubling from a feminist perspective. If decolonization during the long twentieth century was largely driven by multiple forms of anticolonial nationalism, then we must acknowledge that the promise of the nation-state has failed its most vulnerable populations. Misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia continue to the most debates and the of right-wing As transnational feminist scholars have long we must the nation-state to imagine and in of We must imagine into being different of that are and are not and and are the who passed in decolonial is a and It is a of capitalist, as a lived of the social by and other feminist on forms of and a politics, we ask which bodies and have as in our histories of media, and how do we start to this We might begin with a to work that and epistemic in and this issue we are in the conversation on what can by recognition of the power and the of this in the We conceive of the decolonial not as a or so much as an to reckon with the ongoing epistemic and material harms wrought through the of racial capitalism, and the Our of into ongoing and movements that we not define our intellectual in to not define this in with, and oriented new more toward the and of we were by the to our call for The of and media in the initial our that our was not to be but to be more like who had urgent stories to both new and To the we offer this as a whose in the of different of the different visions of what a to the decolonial can look like in film, social media, and The authors think with multiple to to time and media forms, and the environmental postcolonial and studies to feminist film historiography, and critical the the that decolonial offer us in of media and and in the by us in a of for whom is a violent that can describe ongoing of artistic by women in as to and to with a history of and feminist have produced and that a is a and is a The that and to embodied and gendered of that artistic practice has long been in the and of the and of but violent forms of bodily such as For these are of embodied against the of and cultural The of bodily and rather than or forms of underline the nature of that is not by or institutions but the and of such as physical and cultural what feminist do with to ongoing and most the as sites that as both of violence and of anticolonial a and in the film, made by to Indigenous into our existing of The is with questions of time and the imagination of in a has colonized our with a of the future as and as this the of Indigenous to imagine and of and that can help us build new Hollywood and of imagine that seek to with an that the of the of with Indigenous we that the has been a daily for for The does not from on a in the but is the from which struggle is as a mode of a term by to describe a in Indigenous storytelling that time as and that like a This or rather understanding of is into the of the film which can be as of the past and the and its depredations are and but to only does refuse the view that and colonialism are structures, but it also to the modern from the The two in the film, a and an the of through such embodied as and As has the decolonial is not to in the the of and from the struggles of By making and parts of the everyday of a the in fact, into in of the and as of how to ethical as their orientation to the world, to all and in the world, and through this orientation new are materially us to the that decolonial praxis can and must be of of and of with the narrative of that struggles for on feminist anticolonial who to the of the the the of and neoliberal that the future of the and new into economic and cultural For feminists, the as they the between and the postcolonial as as the from which women their anticolonial in in we such as as a for and of feminist is a also in the that and and in the own of these the that from be it or or ecological as they to the of imagination in futures. Thus, in this of and become that the work of decolonial as an made from a place of Not such as and through this as that can be wrought through and with who praxis in on being and has continually reinvented from the through the with the of as a in As this a of feminist and struggles across Asia and into the also the ways in which we and teach histories of cinema, the of certain Cinema to as film or as At the same carefully us from a decolonial feminist that is on and us toward that would accommodate multiple across the of gender, and To from the and this decolonial us to not how can be in the of decolonization as the of but how of decolonization through women about for “The the and the and the of is a of women in media and work in the of the in the is as of and of well as a transnational was a decolonial in its as and the the industry hierarchies and gendered and were as and the strategic of these women who under structures of and Decolonial Media The and of Media critiques the of as a for all of that the to decolonize has been to a that white and with the violence of What is in this and discourse is any of the Indigenous who the of settler of that the as to themselves as Thus, like that any decolonial feminist its must the of various they women, white or colonial power structures. such the by and Indigenous The which has been used on the decades of by various Indigenous to mainstream and transnational to the It also and a of a that would a or with the of the or the the in this issue coloniality as within multiple media forms by offer for intellectual and artistic decolonial to to we multiple media histories in this a a set of by and offer for film and media “The a that has become in media scholars have made in this us, for example, that archives are not of or historical and that can be only because it is first this of work in its own epistemic violence through its in a that the white and of the to which and our attention decades on the work that an category such as does in feminist and it takes for what it and what it The is not to find a new to the but to dismantle the masculinist settler colonial by the ways in which we understand the and collective labor of those who are in their more those who are in started with the of we now to as decolonial A for our of toward the Film and Media the racial reckoning that has the in both the and the and what our will and work do we study or seek at work do we and and what kind of scholarship do we outside the of film and media What we those methodologies, and critical as limits and work to the epistemic of our How might that change the of our What debates would of view, and which ones would to the What media texts would become and As the questions so must the that there is no to and our this is not a call for for a of our work as feminist and the that the of colonial and in that the the the the the the the and the as humans and the relations between humans and are continually so are the that we are Our anthems of the future not as an the decolonial not as a but rather as an ongoing a revolution that is not past or failed or but the of the being in is get we have work to

The realities of African women remain a central concern in human rights discussions within Francophone African literature, as women continue to pursue their struggle for a dignified presence in social spaces and seeking solutions rooted in their cultural realities. This study explores how motherhood becomes a space of feminist resistance against patriarchal norms in Dear Ijeawele: A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2017), using the theoretical framework of Amazonian feminism, which is anchored in African traditions that value collective memory, community resilience, and intergenerational solidarity. In a context where colonial and patriarchal legacies shape social structures, Adichie’s text, through its fifteen educational suggestions, transforms parenting into a tool of resistance and transmission of transformative values. Through a critical discourse analysis, this research demonstrates how Adichie deconstructs normative gender roles while proposing a feminist pedagogy adapted to African contexts. Drawing on the works of Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, Amina Mama, and Ifi Amadiume, this study highlights motherhood as a political act embodying decolonial agency. It situates Dear Ijeawele within the continuity of African feminist texts such as So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ and I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem by Maryse Condé, demonstrating how feminist parenting contributes to dismantling patriarchal structures while fostering equity and shared parental care. All citations from the manifesto refer to the official French translation. KEYWORDS: Amazonian feminism, decolonization, motherhood and resistance, Francophone African literature, feminist parenting, transformative pedagogy

Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas: Performance, Representation, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition

The Oxford Handbook of Sociology for Social Justice is a collection of over thirty chapters focused on how sociological research and applications can be used in various struggles for equality, safety, and liberation. The authors describe and promote sociological concepts, theories, and methods that have empowered academic scholars to support political organizing, popular education, and innovative and grassroots policymaking, in an effort to democratize knowledge production and provide some of the ideological and political tools to dismantle exploitative colonial and patriarchal structures, as well as the colonial roots of the discipline itself. This Handbook is a compendium of international scholars presenting real-life examples of how sociologists can “make a difference,” in myriad forms of research, teaching, and action. Ultimately, the Handbook shows an alternative path for young sociologists and those who still believe the discipline can be a powerful force for social justice.

Mapping Intergenerational Diné BeautyReading Hózhǫ́ in the Poetry of Tacey M. Atsitty Michael P. Taylor (bio) and Elena Arana (bio) The songs and memories of our ancestors continue to reverberate in these contemporary stories and poems; they bridge worlds and restore beauty within all things. —Sherwin Bitsui, Foreword to The Diné Reader Esther Belin (Diné) begins her introduction to The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature with a concise but comprehensive timeline of Diné (Navajo) literary history: “Time immemorial, jiní. Time immemorial is where these stories transpired—carrying constellation chill and sparkle, drama and tragedy, hope and laughter” (Belin et al. 3). Belin’s declaration of Diné literary origins serves both as a testament to the endurance of Diné stories and as a recognition of Diné creation and Diné bizaad (the Navajo language) as the regenerative cultural, epistemological, and spiritual sources from which Diné literatures have continued to adapt through generations of removal, relocation, and return. Contemporary Diné writers often locate their work within a similar intergenerational timeline. When defining poetry, for example, Tacey M. Atsitty locates her poetic origins at Creation: “Poetry is language, and language is what was used to form this world” (“Just a Poet”). Because the creative and cultural processes of the Diné world and worldview have been so forcefully disrupted by settler colonial strategies of land appropriation, resource extraction, assimilation, and outright genocide, the perennial purpose of Diné literatures continues to be, as Sherwin Bitsui (Diné) explains, to “bridge worlds and restore beauty within all things” (Foreword xvi). [End Page 337] Put another way, Diné literatures seek, enact, and embody hózhǫ́ the fundamental aesthetic, philosophy, theoretical framework, spiritual practice, and sociopolitical statement of Diné literatures, particularly poetry.1 It is an understanding of hózhǫ́, for example, that reconciles Luci Tapahonso’s poetic juxtapositions of home and exile (Fast 191–95). As poet laureate of the Navajo Nation, Laura Tohe writes of the enduring, diverse, ever-adapting understanding and embodied practice of hózhǫ́: In Beauty it was begun.In Beauty it continues. In Beauty, In Beauty, In Beauty, In Beauty. (“In Dinétah” 104) Tohe’s poetic repetition of capitalized Beauty, or hózhǫ́, serves as a call to move beyond documenting and marveling at the particular craft of Diné poetics and to place hózhǫ́ at the center of all Diné-specific critical and literary inquiry.2 This article turns to Atsitty’s 2018 debut collection of poems, Rain Scald, to assert hózhǫ́ as an analytical and theoretical apparatus through which Diné poetry manifests its distinct cultural, rhetorical, and national sovereignty while, at the same time, informing the ways we read and engage distinct and shared literatures across all Indigenous nations.3 Near the beginning of Rain Scald, Atsitty offers a four-part poem entitled “Ach’íí’.”4 Each part of the poem delicately sutures the ostensibly contradictory realities of being Diné in the twenty-first century—suicide and survival, uranium-induced illness and communal care, Christian conversion and Diné ceremony—into a cohesive individual and collective identity. The poem concludes with memories of Atsitty’s father leaving home as a foster child in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Indian Student Placement Program:5 Dad says he remembers the first time he died,that long bus ride when they took him [End Page 338] to Utah for school. He had been memorizingland formations: an angel the size of his hand disappeared, and after that he was so emptyfrom crying and so full of rememberingrocks, he just fell asleep. (Atsitty, Rain Scald 7) Describing her father’s first removal from his home and homelands, Atsitty shares her father’s strategy for survival: the traditional practice of memorizing the land. Klara Kelley and Harris Francis (Diné) describe this practice of land memorization as cognitive mapmaking and wayfinding that is grounded in oral stories that have kept the Diné connected to Creation and to Diné Bikéyah (“People’s Sacred Lands,” or Navajo homelands) since the Diné first emerged into the current world (85–86). Atsitty poeticizes her father’s childhood removal from home and his land- and story-based mapping that would enable his...

This article examines the figure and path of Christ in contrast with the structure of the plantation. Far from being a relic of the past, the plantation is an economic and social form revelatory of often-repressed and ongoing dynamics connected to land, labor, and race. Attending to the dangerous memory of those exploited and oppressed serves to subvert this order of empire and open space for different hopes. Furthermore, it lifts up the prophetic memory of people’s traditions in which Christ is identified with alternative orders of commonwealth and the commons. These alternatives are incarnated in grassroots African American traditions rooted in commonly held land, cooperative labor, and communal care, especially in the theological vision, political organizing, and communal practice of Fannie Lou Hamer and Freedom Farms Cooperative.

Dear Sir, Evolutionary changes in the knowledge society and the rapid increase of scientific and technological information have outlined new territories and dilemmas for health professionals. New challenges and new demands need to be faced so as to make balanced decisions that privilege the wellbeing and the rights of individuals and their priorities as patients. The Hippocratic Oath and other deontological codes have contributed, from the global historical perspective, to the regulation of these actions. However, many of these precepts have been overtaken by new questions and ethical dilemmas. Bioethics was originally created as a survival strategy that allows the preservation of the rights of the individuals and their ecosystems in the face of uncontrolled technical growth and technological development based on supply and demand. That is why Bioethics has positioned itself as a contemporary, valid regulatory axis in health and medicine.[1] In neurosciences, punctual paradigms of knowledge, which also require more specialized attention, are introduced. The enormous display of scientific information in this area, technological development and its Translational impact have surpassed both our capacity to regulate and the dimension of the decisions centered on the wellbeing of the patient. That is why civil society and a meeting of journalists and science advocates proposed the concept of neuroethics before the scientific community did. Beyond the use or the fashion of the prefix neuro, which some authors consider eroded and unreasonably abused, the international community of bioethicians dedicated to neurosciences has identified a process that is supported by both branches: (i) Solid education in bioethical knowledge and (ii) Knowledge as an expert in the area of neurosciences. That is why we pose the question of the pertinence and validity of the concept of neuroethics as an entity that represents a more integral and global vision than a bioethics of neurosciences.[3,4] International consensus identifies two fundamental meanings in this innovative perspective of the discipline: On the one hand, Ethics in Neuroscience, which refers to the analysis of all the ethical implications that arise in the creation of knowledge, research, technological development, and clinical practice (Neurology, Neurosurgery, Psychiatry), according to a specific sociocultural context. And on the other hand, there is the Neuroscience of Ethics, which refers to the study of the neural basis for ethical behavior, free will, moral conscience and behavior based on values and precepts. In consequence, neuroethics supposes a dual and bi-directional concept with an axis that connects a great number of topics that need to be considered through the lens of humanistic thought and not only through hard scientific data.[5] The editorial proposal described by Faria[2] analyzes the certainty that the Hippocratic Oath does not cover all the branches of knowledge in current neurosciences and proposes an ethics of Neuroscience. However, the reach of disciplinary ethics covers only marginal aspects of the field of Bioethics within the enormous area of scientific and technological knowledge that is Neuroscience. That is why we must emphasize the relevance of strengthening ethical education in the training of human resources for health. Although the scientific community has worked to refine its educational processes and their pragmatic application that preserves the principles and values of neuroethics, there is suspicion based on the fact that ethical decisions must obey to the educational profile of the medical-scientific individual, to his or her internal and moral will, and not to a legal precept. Neuroethics must appeal to the moral conscience of individuals about what is right and wrong in the area of Neuroscience, and not necessarily to a legal assertion. It seems that the concept of Neuroethics is here to stay, in the expectation that it can be conformed by specialized personnel who are honorable scientific leaders, to serve as a guide to decision-making in ethical dilemmas in the neurosciences, all of this under the premise of maintaining and conserving the rights of the individual and the rights of the patient from a humanistic perspective.

This chapter puts to the test the long-held perception of a pervasive peasant consciousness brought about by exposure to a system of colonial governmentality before the liberation struggle. Using empirical evidence from a case study of the Diwa community in north-eastern Zimbabwe, the chapter instead posits that at the onset of the liberation war, some parts of the country had not yet been exposed to any significant colonial government structures that had made other areas despise colonialism. This chapter thus argues that the Diwa case study reveals that there were other factors that did not necessarily have anything to do with disgruntlement over governmentality that made peasants to support the war of liberation. In the final analysis, the chapter cautions against the generalisation of an embedded link between the liberation struggle and the discourse of nationalism, and postulates that generalisations based on a few case studies should be avoided as situations and conditions differed and accordingly affected the levels of peasant consciousness differently in colonial Zimbabwe.

This article begins with idea of ‘housewifization’ borrowed from Maria Mies, to problematize the genealogy of the social construction of ‘non-working’ housewives whose contributions to capitalist development are often invisibilized and rendered as ‘shadow-work’. Parallels have been drawn between the ‘other’ of capitalist structures and housewives, which legitimizes their exploitation. This essay illustrates how the taken for granted ‘natural’ binaries need to be deconstructed and trace its social construction; in order to strive towards a more egalitarian society. The construction of the role of the housewife is also embedded in the interplay between the patriarchal social structures and the economic structures; with male capital owners subordinating women as dispossessed housewives. The social construction of the dialectic of the ‘private’ and the ‘public’ space in the course of the changing labour relations is also crucial to the legitimization of this process. However, this essay also tries to deconstruct the ideas of public and private as well; focusing on instances where such distinction gets blurred. It strives to analyse the parallels between a housewife and a slave, in order to elucidate the deplorable condition of each. These dominant ideologies and patterns of exploitation bear similarities with the structures of colonialism, with women being seen as ‘the last colony’. Discussions have centred on how the transnational migration of care workers is fostered by rising employment of middle-class women. They have varying tasks and responsibilities, which often resemble the traditional role of the housewife, with many of them living inside or close to the house of the employing family. Hence, this essay attempts to analyse how ‘becoming a housewife’ has less to do with one’s gender, but more to do with a range of socially constructed ‘feminine’ activities that both men and women partake.

Special Report: Ethical Decision-Making in Contemporary Psychiatric Practice—An Evolving Challenge

Zones of Occult Instability: The Birth of the Novel in Africa

Transnational Dimensions of Moroccan Gender History

The deep influences of ubuntu, a traditional African philosophy that emphasizes community and unity, are examined in this paper as a significant factor in the creation of the moral landscape in African literature. Ubuntu, which is sometimes translated as “I am because we are,” demonstrates a communal ethic that emphasizes individual cooperation within a group. This study looked at how ubuntu is portrayed and examined in African literary works across a range of genres and eras. The analysis focused on how ubuntu serves as a moral compass, influencing characters’ actions, relationships, and ethical decisions in African literature. Through a comprehensive examination of select literary works of J.J. Thwala and O.K. Matsepe, this paper elucidates how ubuntu shapes the moral dilemmas, conflicts, and resolutions depicted in the narratives. This paper serves as a critical analysis of the moral values found in African literature, making it a valuable tool for analyzing moral narratives and providing readers with a means of gaining a deeper understanding of the complex moral situations presented in these literary works. It is clear that ubuntu is an important moral legacy in African literature, as evidenced by the works of writers such as J. J. Thwala and O. K. Matsepe. Through their stories, these writers contribute to the preservation and development of ubuntu as a long-lasting and universal ethical paradigm in African literary tradition. Keywords: African literature. Community. Figurative. Kindness. Literal. Moral.

Studying Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle is not an easy task. There are various aspects to consider that give insight to ideologies, philosophies, identities, and narratives that make up the history of the liberation struggle.1 Raftopolous and Mlambo (2009) provided a concise history of Zimbabwe’s political legacy since the days of Rhodesia. Bhebhe and Ranger (1996) examined how Africans experienced life during and after the war, essentially tracing Rhodesia’s metamorphosis into Zimbabwe and its impact on African life, beliefs, and traditions. Kriger (1991) examined the complex relationship between liberation fighters and African civilians. Although the aforementioned works provide insight into various aspects of Zimbabwe’s liberation history, scholarship is underdeveloped in the discussion of leadership as an important element of Zimbabwe’s armed struggle.

- Part One -VoiceIn an analysis of gender and parliamentary politics in Uganda, When Hens Begin to Crow, Sylvia Tamale writes:Female chickens normally do not crow. At least popular mythology claims that they cannot. Hence, in many African cultures a crowing hen is considered an omen of bad tidings that must be expiated through the of the offending bird.1Tamale's metaphor intimates that the position of women in many African cultures is synonymous with that of the female chicken. This is because when Ugandan/African women attempted to transgress patriarchal boundaries by audibly and overtly moving out of their normative silent space into arenas such as politics, TV and radio broadcasting, feminist activities, and even writing, they are publicly criticized for their conceived misdemeanour. Tamale's comparison is not only an indicator of the privileging of the male cockerel and, by extension, the African male, whose normative duty it is to assume a position of power and give reign to his voice by crowing, but also indicates the importance - in the African context - of a hen crowing. Thus, when females begin crossing over into what African society constructs as male territory, it is considered a bad sign: so much so, that the most effective way of repression is considered to be the immediate slaughter of the offender, feathered or otherwise. Nevertheless, this chapter argues that the notion of the silent African woman is a fallacy introduced into African culture by eurocentric Victorian attitudes towards women, which continues to be perpetuated by some African men, and by European writers and critics.2Tamale was reminded of this myth when a female candidate's attention was drawn to the old African saying ? Wall owulide ensera ekokolima?' (Have you ever heard a hen crow?) by a male audience member at a campaign rally during the 1996 general elections to Uganda's national legislature.3 Such a reaction is not unusual in Africa; silence has been one of the most powerful tools of subjugation of African women.4 Ciarunji Chesaina Swinimer stresses Bukenya's point in her summing-up of African women's social position:In traditional Africa, among many communities, especially those operating through patriarchal social systems, women occupied a very low status. Even in matriarchal communities women were not completely liberated from social discrimination. It is true they lived among their blood relatives unlike their counterparts in the patriarchal communities who lived among their in-laws, yet even here women did not enjoy much social recognition since important decisions were made on their behalf by their brothers.5Patriarchal values in Africa thus demand that women do not voice an opinion, particularly in public, since their status is constructed such that they are regarded as subordinate to men: an attitude that is upheld and reinforced by many African traditions and folklore, as highlighted in the foregoing chapters. Ciarunji Chesaina clarifies the situation:One of the major problems facing women in postcolonial Africa in general, and Kenya in particular, is the chauvinistic traditional attitude towards women's views as unimportant and inconsequential. Indeed, in traditional and colonial Africa, women's words were regarded as mere noise. Unfortunately, the roots of tradition, including the negative aspects, go deep into the psyche of a people. Hence negative traditional attitudes towards women still thrive in contemporary African cultures. Women's views are still regarded as unimportant, as the insignificant representation of women in the parliaments of most African countries attests.6By crowing, a hen transgresses boundaries by audibly, hence overtly, moving out of its normative silent space. The implication behind the male spectator's comment was that the political arena forms part of the sphere of life from which the construction of African normative gender roles endeavours to exclude women. …