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>> 61 3 Putting the Political in Economy African Women’s and Gender History, 1992–2010 Claire Robertson In the mid-1980s, my historiographical survey of scholarly works on African women revealed a focus on political economy, with emphases on women’s highly productive and important economic activities and women’s agency, moving away from the tendency either to ignore women entirely or treat them as passive victims. These attempts to rectify the gaps in the literature rebutted the stereotypical oversexualization of black women by whites and the related assumption that female slaves in Africa were mainly desired for biological reproduction, for instance.1 Since then scholarship on African women and gender has multiplied to the point that any assessment of new historical works becomes a daunting task. Comprehensiveness is no longer possible; a work could be excellent and not cited in this thematic appraisal of over 150 randomly selected works. Shown here is that since about 1992 the political part of political economy is ascending. Women’s power and political concerns have emerged as major foci of this literature in a continuing interdisciplinary scholarly tradition. This chapter also addresses Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí’s assertion in The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses that all “Western” women have a preset agenda in studying “African” women that derives from “Western” experiences and is neocolonialist and irrelevant to “African” women, who should set their own priorities for research regarding women and gender.2 While the totalizing categories of “Western” and “African” women are deeply problematic, her main point is worth testing. It raises the question of identifying the priorities of an “African” research agenda on women and gender. The questions thus become: who has been primarily responsible for refocusing African women’s and gender history on issues of power? Is this agenda shared by African and non-African scholars of Africa? This chapter seeks answers to these questions by assessing the historiography on African women and gender, its strengths and weaknesses, its contributions to the wider historical enterprise, and its trajectory from 1992 on, when the trend began that is still dominant of emphasizing power issues with regard to gender. 62 > 63 scholars, whose works had often been ignored.6 Subsequently the deficit in numbers of African women scholars, an artifact of colonial and neocolonial thought and experiences chronicled by many cited here, has been substantially reduced. The growing impact of African women’s and gender studies on African studies in general is evident from the annual conference programs of the African Studies Association, the largest international group of Africa-related scholars in the world, whose membership now includes many Africans and African Americans, Euro-Americans and Europeans. As the ASA moved from a predominantly white male membership in the 1960s to its present diversity, the proportion of sessions that had in their title women or gender increased markedly. In 1981, 8 percent fell into that category; in 1995 more than 11 percent, and by 2009 almost 13 percent, while the rise in the number of other panels with at least one paper on women or gender went from 5.6 percent in 1981 to 11.1 percent in 1995 and 8 percent in 2009, demonstrating the further integration of women and gender studies within African studies.7 Lest we become too optimistic, however, Tiyambe Zeleza provides a necessary corrective in his survey of African history textbooks’ coverage of women and/or gender. In eight general African histories authored by Americans, Britons, and Africans of various nationalities, he found that none adequately represented women and that female authors were rare. The few that did include materials on African women confined their commentary mainly to titles of illustrations and infantilized women by classifying them with slaves and children.8 In African slavery studies the omission of women as slaves and slave owners largely continues, even though most slaves kept in Africa were female.9 Unlike most African studies journals, the Journal of African History (JAH), the oldest Anglophone journal on the subject that began in 1960, has never published a special issue on African women or gender. The first two women, both white, to publish in it were Margaret Priestley in its first issue, and Diana Wylie seventeen years later. The first article focusing on an African woman was in 1975 by Joseph Miller, on Queen Nzinga of Matamba . Keletso Atkins became the first woman of color to publish an article in the JAH in 1986...

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