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Feminist Studies

Nego‐Feminism: Theorizing, Practicing, and Pruning Africa’s Way

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In this article I will explore, among other issues, the intertwining of the colonial moment, the politics of fieldwork, and the politics of representation in feminist scholarship and development studies by revisiting the processes of theory making and knowledge construction in an environment of unequal power relations and cultural difference. I will use the different features and methods of feminist engagement in Africa to propose what I call nego‐feminism (the feminism of negotiation; no ego feminism) as a term that names African feminisms.5 Aware of a practice (feminism in Africa) that is as diverse as the continent itself, I propose nego‐feminism not to occlude the diversity but to argue, as I do in the discussion of “building on the indigenous” in the last section of this article, that a recurrent feature in many African cultures can be used to name the practice. The diversity of the African continent notwithstanding, there are shared values that can be used as organizing principles in discussions about Africa, as Daniel Etounga‐Manguelle aptly notes: “The diversity—the vast number of subcultures [in Africa]—is undeniable. But there is a foundation of shared values, attitudes, and institutions that binds together the nations south of the Sahara, and in many respects those of the north as well” (Etounga‐Manguelle 2000, 67).

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: The University of Chicago Press.,
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English
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Africa
Nego-Feminism
Theorizing
Practicing
Pruning
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Article
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