01 February 2019 → 31 July 2021
European funding: framework programme
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Development of methods and techniques
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African history
Gender
African languages
19th Century
20th Century
Contemporary
Field research
Africa
History
This project aims at rethinking ways of reading and writing change in African gender history. Looking at oral
historical narratives and the transgenerational communication of historical knowledge among the Yaawo-speaking
people in northern Mozambique, it brings the study of gender in African deeper pasts in dialogue with a cultural
analysis of the contemporary historical moment. My starting argument is that our understanding of the contemporary
historical moment in African gender history is strongly framed by the gender and development models of the social
sciences which emphasize women’ struggle for gender equality in relation to men. This understanding influences the
way in which we approach the past and write our research narratives. Through this history writing, women’ historical
experiences become fixed within teleological narratives of ‘iberation’(/‘ppression’. The past is distanced from
the present along a linear path, and what is termed the ‘recolonial past’is isolated as a separate unit of study. In my
research, I seek to challenge this temporal model and explore new ways to read and write gendered histories that more
fully capture the multiplicity of the gendered temporalities that constitute African existence.
Overall, my study has a two-fold objective: Firstly, on the basis of the Yaawo oral historical narratives, it aims to
contribute to our understanding of female political and spiritual power in Africa’ precolonial past and the historical
processes of change in the colonial and postcolonial contexts. Secondly, I will study how these deeper histories also
echo and are reworked in the present and thus constitute the contemporary historical experience in interaction with,
for instance, more recent socialist ideas of women’ emancipation and the current development discourse on gender
equality. Overall, my research proposes to open new routes in the theoretical thinking as well as the methodologies of
African gender history.
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Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Executive Agency (REA). Neither the European Union nor the authority can be held responsible for them.