Afrika Kolloquium: Feminism and Modernity in Anglophone African Women’s Writing: A 21st-Century Global Context

13.12.2022 17:15

A talk with Dr. Dobrota Pucherová, Senior Researcher at the Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava and a lecturer in the Department of African Studies and the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna.

Chair: Daniela Waldburger, Rémi Tchokothe

This book re-reads the last 60 years of Anglophone African women’s writing from a transnational and trans-historical feminist perspective, rather than postcolonial, from which these texts have been traditionally interpreted. Such a comparative frame throws into relief patterns across time and space that make it possible to situate this writing as an integral part of women’s literary history. Revisiting this literature in a comparative context with Western women writers since the 18th century, the author highlights how invocations of "tradition" have been used by patriarchy everywhere to subjugate women, the similarities between women’s struggles worldwide, and the feminist imagination it produced. The author argues that in the 21st century, African feminism has undergone a major epistemic shift: from a culturally exclusive to a relational feminism that conceptualizes African femininity through the risky opening of oneself to otherness, transculturation, and translation. Like Western feminists in the 1960s, contemporary African women writers are turning their attention to the female body as the prime site of women’s oppression and freedom, reframing feminism as a demand for universal human rights and actively shaping global discourses on gender, modernity, and democracy. More information

Dr. Dobrota Pucherová is Senior Reseracher at the Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava and a lecturer in the Department of African Studies and the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna. Her research and teaching interests are mainly in African and Afro-European literature in English, postcolonial Anglophone literature and Central European literature, especially in relation to theories of postcolonialism, postcommunism, feminism, diaspora, transculturalism, cosmopolitanism and world literature. She is the author of The Ethics of Dissident Desire in Southern African Writing (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2011) and co-editor of Postcolonial Europe? Essays on Post-Communist Literatures and Cultures (Rodopi, 2015) and Moving Spirit: The Legacy of Dambudzo Marechera in the 21st Century (2012), in addition to many journal articles and book chapters.

Tuesday, 13. December 2022, 5:15pm
Department of African Studies - Seminar room 1
Campus Court 5.1.,  Spitalgasse 2, 1090 Vienna