BEXP 17A13 - Insurgent feminisms: gender and war in East Africa

This course tackles East Africa’s prolific literary production with a focus on the topic of postcolonial wars through the explicit and interdisciplinary lens of feminist, decolonial, gender and sexuality studies. East Africa, comprising almost twenty countries, is complex geographical entity marked by a history of war, genocide, transforming borders, and an immense and extraordinary flux of displacement and migration. Writing about war, globally, has historically validated masculine structures and repeatedly undermined women. Yet, war is again and again fought on the backs of women, children and historically marginalized populations. We will focus on East Africa as a site where these masculinist dynamics of war can be observed but also decentered, and reshaped. Literary fiction, memoir, poetry and theory from and about East Africa destabilize and re-imagine how one writes, thinks and talks about war and its multiplying aftermaths, and along the way broaden understandings of insurgent and resistant feminist thought. With the moment of independence as a starting point, students will be assigned a selection of literary works and theoretical writing that explore questions of war and its afterlives, nation, gendered resistance, feminist and queer epistemologies, spatiality and ecology through relationships to the land, rivers and the Indian ocean, and violence and inter-East African relationalities during the Cold War.