Twenty-Five Years of African Women Writing African Women’s and Gendered Worlds

Abstract

This article explores the evolution of scholarly writing by Anglophone African born women scholars and theorists over the last twenty-five years. It asks and answers questions about the geographic and thematic spread of these women’s writing; the relationship between African and non-African born women scholars of the African world; and the conversation that their published narratives have had with one another. It considers the following questions: are African women scholars and their non-African counterparts working on similar themes? Does scholarship written by African women complicate, affirm, or otherwise offer up a different narrative from that written by non-African born scholars? What, if any, tensions have arisen between these scholars over the reading, writing, and interpretation of historical evidence? What about similarities, differences, and evolutions in the writing of African women’s worlds by African born scholars? Last, but not least, this short article ponders the question, where does gender fit into African women’s narratives?