This field I call home: black feminist (auto)ethnography in Alexandra Township, South Africa

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article is based on a study of Pentecostal Charismatic constructions of femininity in Alexandra Township, Johannesburg. I narrate my ‘native’ and (auto)ethnographic standing within the community I study and show how this stance accounts for my ethical considerations and for the building of relationships with my participants. Relying on ‘Blackwomen’ scholarship (Gqola, 2017), this article addresses the gaps and misconceptions in anthropological accounts of Black African Pentecostal women by writing as an embodied voice within the movement, rather than a mere object of research. This article then, heeds to Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s argument for ethnographies ‘that offer new points of reentry by questioning the symbolic world upon which “nativeness” is premised’ and ‘that aim explicitly at the destabilization and eventual destruction of the Savage slot’ (Trouillot, 2003, p. 22). I argue that Black and African feminist autoethnography is a research method that can destruct this Savage slot as it not only questions reductionist representations of what Black African women are. Black African feminist autoethnography also takes seriously the foregrounding and offering of Black women’s voices to transform the anthropological canon so that it reflects the richness and validity of Black feminist thought. In this way, I take a stand for the telling of African stories by African women in a responsibility for engagement and change, and to illuminate the meaning of township women’s everyday experiences as a legitimate source of knowledge.