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The four sister editors of this anthology came together in September 2005 with the goal of bringing the voices of emerging African women writers to a wider audience. With its specific focus on writing as a tool of resistance to the multiple challenges faced by African women today, African Women Writing Resistance is the product of the collective vision of the editors and the thirtyone women from thirteen countries and many linguistic backgrounds who contributed to this groundbreaking pan-African volume. African Women Writing Resistance answers the clarion call of an earlier collection published by Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez, Women Writing Resistance : Essays on Latin America and the Caribbean (South End Press, 2004), which collected essays and poetry from that region’s well-known and emerging women writers. Editing this first collection launched Jennifer on a global quest to follow the trail of women’s resistance across cultural and geographic boundaries, always looking for clues as to how she, as a white American feminist teacher and activist, could become the most effective ally for women in very different circumstances from her own. xiii Preface Roots of the Collection In 2005 Jennifer was thinking about putting together a class and an anthology on contemporary African women’s writing. As events have a way of crystallizing when the time is right, she was also at this time getting to know Pauline Dongala, an exile from Congo-Brazzaville who became one of her students at BardCollegeatSimon’sRock;anotherSimon’sRockstudent,NigerianOmotayo Jolaosho, who was then finishing her B.A.; and Anne Serafin, an African literature specialist whom she metat aModern Language Association panel on female genital mutilation (FGM) in literature in 2004. Pauline, Omotayo, and Anne became enthusiastic partners in the Women Writing Resistance in Africa project, sharing with Jennifer a common vision of a book that would bring together many strong contemporary African women’s voices, women writing about their lives, their challenges, their hopes, and their dreams. The newly formed editorial group sent out a call for papers for the anthology in the fall of 2005, soliciting personal narratives, testimony, interviews, short stories, poetry, short plays, folktales, and lyrics by African women that concerned resistance to particular challenges or oppressions faced by women in Africa today. We suggested topics such as the effect on women of HIV/AIDS; female genital cutting; Sharia law; women’s poverty and lack of access to education , health care, credit, and political power; armed conflict and rape as a weapon of war; displacement and exile; women’s oppressions within heterosexual relationships; resistant sexualities; and intergenerational conflict and the tension between tradition and modernity. Submissions had to be written by women born in Africa, no matter their current location of residence. Almost immediately a flood of writing began to arrive in our e-mail inboxes , dealing with all the above-listed topics and more. It was obvious that the call for papers had tapped into a powerful, pent-up stream of African women writing resistance that was only waiting for the right channel to reach a world audience. With hundreds of pages worth of submissions in hand, the work of selection began, to which each of us brought her unique perspective. The book you hold in your hand is the collaborative result of many hands, hearts, and minds and of many hours of thought and labor. We send it out into the world in the hope that it will be the inspiration for ever-expanding rings of “women writing resistance”in Africa and worldwide. xiv Preface ...

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