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  • Gendering Global Transformations: Gender, Culture, Race and Identity
  • Mojúbàolú Olúfúnké Okome
Chima J. Korieh and Philomina Okeke-Ihejirika, eds. Gendering Global Transformations: Gender, Culture, Race and Identity. New York: Routledge, 2009. ix + 291 pp. Notes. Bibliography. About the Contributors. Index. $95.00. Cloth.

The agenda of Gendering Global Transformations is ambitious. The migrations of Africans are central to human history: interdisciplinary African studies should more efficiently examine the globalization and transnationalization of Africans worldwide. The book focuses on gender and social change in the twentieth century, exploring themes of "gender, race, culture and identity" (2). It foregrounds male-female struggles for social equality, particularly in developing nations and historically marginalized groups, including some in the African diaspora. Desiring to move beyond the "West versus the rest" analyses generated by older economic and geopolitical relationships, it contends that there are "new forms of exchange . . . within and across [End Page 157] regions" (2). However, cultural and ideological exchanges have also influenced globalization over time.

Reductively, the editors ground their conceptualization of gender in male-female power relations. But although the best chapters highlight women's experiences, struggles, and agency, gender transcends simple binary opposition. Perhaps the dearth of chapters on alternative constructions is explained by an insufficient number of available conference papers. Or maybe gender remains hobbled to binary male-female and woman-centered conceptualizations.

The editors claim that only one chapter (Jerome Teelucksingh's "The United States Media and Caribbean Gender Relations") focuses on masculinities, but Patricia E. Clark's "Cookbooks, Cuisine, Nationalisms: A Study of National Cuisine, Nation Building, and Gender Formation through Black Nationalist Discourse" does so as well. The problem, however, transcends the inclusion of masculinities to acknowledging the breadth of categories encompassed by gender. Also, why did the editors not consider Kelly Hayes's chapter on Pomba Gira ("The Dark Side of the Feminine: Pomba Gira Spirits in Brazil") as directly linked to their "continental and Diasporic (African) subjects and situations of analysis" (7)? As a deity in the pantheon of Umbanda and Cadomble, Pomba Gira is produced by the admixture of African and other influences by enslaved New World Africans.

The title should have indicated the book's Africa focus. From the outset there are also conceptual issues, such as the definition of globalization, which should not only be technological, but also ideological and cultural. Africa's ideological contributions can be gleaned from sociocultural practices like the performance of Ateetee by Oromo women—discussed in Martha Kuwee Kumsa's chapter "Soothing the Wounds of the Nation: Oromo Women Performing Ateetee in Exile." Oromo women mobilize and harness spiritual energy to combat endemic uncertainty and Ethiopia's 150-year colonial oppression and persecution. From far-flung diasporas, they struggle to resist localization and marginalization as "gendered, racialized, and nationalized subaltern" people (87). These painful experiences of exile lead to attempts to link the diasporas with homeland in a spiritual, gendered process in rituals that connect past, present, and future to "soothe the wounds of the nation" from past colonization and contemporary globalization.

Philomina Okeke-Ihejirika's chapter ("Home-Sweet-Home, but Exactly Where? African Women's Immigration and the Challenge of Establishing Selves") addresses a fundamental human quest for a place to call home. She argues for studies of the African experience, but what and where is home? It could be geophysical, reflective of "a diversity of historical and prospective experiential dispositions" indicative of the specific historical trajectories of women's personal "immigration journey" (152). It could also be elusive and ephemeral. Home is at once all these and more.

Transnationalization and globalization are meaningless if concepts of home remain spatially bounded. Thus, for individual constituents of these [End Page 158] communities to build new homes as sojourners may not create detachment from the original home, as Okeke-Ihejirika contends. People can embrace multiple homes. Indeed, it seems more tenable that there is great variety in the meanings and experiences of home. For example, Canadian Africans may re-create home there even as they long for, travel to, communicate with, and maintain linkages with the old country and other places where they may have lived. The linkages they maintain continue to...

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