 non-specialists, each in its own way carries significant implications for the representations we use to teach about the migrations of Bantu speaking communities and Africans in diaspora.
ASA 2012 Roundtable, The Audacity of Gender: Power, Sex and Social Roles in Africanist Research on Early Africa
- In the last decade, new research on early African History prior to the Atlantic Age has shed light on gender dynamics over the last two thousand years, yet virtually none of this research has been incorporated into the recent publications of African gender, women’s histories or recent African history textbooks. Our goal is to produce a text that synthesizes some of this new research into an intellectually rigorous, multimedia resource for use in the undergraduate classroom. This type of text is critical because it adds depth to our understanding of Africa’s varied and diverse gender systems in at least the two millennia before colonial rule, but also because it will enable us to add nuance to our understandings of colonial era interactions and post-colonial developments. While it is clearly difficult to delve into such early eras and reconstruct social systems, it is possible to analyze Africa's gender histories prior to the late pre-colonial period, when there are more plentiful written documents from outsider observers - the explorers, missionaries and colonists. This new research on early African gender dynamics is based on evidence from historical linguistic, archeological, and oral traditions. These internally generated sources have added dimension and even challenged the perspectives presented by outside observers, and scholars of African gender and African women's history. This roundtable summarizes the recent research on gender and women in Africa, methods for unearthing early African gender history, cases from west, central and east Africa, and discuss with the audience ideas on how to situate the textbook and impact the prevalent historiography.
Vieira-Martinez, Carolyn, et.al. “Interrogating Anthropological Spectacles,” Critique of Anthropology, Sage, under review.
______. “Ubuntu not Ubantu” in Poverty and Empowerment in Africa. Toyin Falola, ed. Forthcoming.
______, et.al. Bold Mamas and Audacious Entrepreneurs, proposal in discussion with Oyeronke Oyewumi, ed. Book Series: Gender and Cultural Studies in Africa and the Diaspora. Palgrave/ Macmillan
______, et. al. Bantu History (Oxford University Press, 2013).