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11 When a Man Loves a Woman: Gender and National Identity in Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman and Mariama Bâ’s Scarlet Song Eileen Julien The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well you do not stand in one place. Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God Literature as we know it today is a gendered practice. This is not because gendered lives are its referents: the study of those real lives is primarily the work of historians, sociologists, and anthropologists. Rather it is through the workings of the material worlds of publishing, teaching, and criticism, through narrative processes of selection and omission and strategies of representation, that literature is gendered. These processes and strategies will be our focus here: Readers, teachers, and critics who are conscious of the logic of gender are able to foreground both critical aspects of texts that typically are overlooked and the conditions that push certain texts into the limelight while obscuring others. This does not mean that gender is the most powerful explanatory category of analysis nor a category that is complete unto itself. In fact, gender’s high visibility as an analytical tool and the mostly celebratory readings of African women’s writing in recent African literary scholarship may have obscured other discreet, if not unrelated, factors of strati¤cation, such as class or access to education , that have equal relevance for understanding the lives of women and men that are drawn in texts we read. Whatever their speci¤c arguments or the debates they have generated, the work of I¤ Amadiume (1987) on “traditional” Igbo gender roles and that of Oyeronke Oyewumi (1997) on the absence of gender categories in the Yorùbá language serve as reminders of the importance of taking into account the multiple factors at play in identity. No mode of analysis, and certainly not gender, exists in a vacuum. If there is a debate on the epistemological merit of gender as a category within African studies, is it not precisely because the preoccupation with gender is felt to come from “somewhere” and that somewhere might not be Africa? Thus the question “Whose African studies?” is also germane. If one refers to the study of Africa practiced within American institutions of higher learning, then this location, as they all do, comes with baggage—the initial post-Sputnik tensions and rivalry (which is to say U.S. foreign policy concerns) that gave rise to African studies programs in the 1960s; the centrality of Title VI funding, which structures such programs around outreach and language training and has tended to privilege the social sciences; and the divergent trajectories, the often separate and typically unequal resources, the frequently tense relations between African studies and African-American (or Afro-American) studies. In fact, “African studies,”some have argued, is inherently and uniquely a U.S. formulation, in which Africa—like Latin America and Asia and perhaps even more than them—is appended to discipline-based university curricula and suffers from marginality and second-class citizenship. I am alluding to arguments set forth in Africa Today (1997) over the decline of the area studies model in the United States and the debate at the University of Cape Town in the late 1990s over the relevance of “African studies” as a way of conceptualizing and packaging the study of Africa. Is the theme “Africa after gender?” about the aptness and merits of attention paid to gender in the study of Africa within universities in the United States, where a prevailing feminist consciousness may obscure North American women ’s own collusion with global processes and other forms of oppression that affect African women adversely? Or is it about gender and the study of Africa more generally outside Africa, since “African studies,” as the marginal unit described above, presumably does not exist in Africa? Or is it rather about the study of Africa everywhere, including Africa ¤rst and foremost? There is strong evidence that gender has become an important category of analysis on the continent . Since 1994, for example, the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) has sponsored an institute on gender each summer with the participation of twelve to ¤fteen researchers from around the continent and in every ¤eld.1 On a personal level, I witnessed the interest and demands of students at the University of Yaoundé in fall semester 1998: whether because it was fashionable to do so or because it resonated...

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