African Studies Graduate Seminar: Narrative Resistance and Feminist Reimagination in African Women’s Literature

African Studies Graduate Seminar 

Narrative Resistance and Feminist Reimagination in African Women’s Literature

Theon Gruber Ford, PhD Candidate, Department of African Studies examines the works of Buchi Emecheta, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Tsitsi Dangarembga, focusing on how their narratives disrupt patriarchal, colonial, and socio-economic frameworks through innovative storytelling techniques such as fragmentation, polyphony, and nonlinearity. African women’s literature offers a compelling critique of entrenched systems of power while simultaneously envisioning new possibilities for identity, community, and agency.

Through close readings of The Joys of Motherhood, Half of a Yellow Sun, Purple Hibiscus, Second-Class Citizen, Nervous Conditions, and This Mournable Body, this study explores how these authors challenge dominant narratives and reclaim African women’s voices. Drawing on African feminist frameworks such as nego-feminism and African womanism, this research foregrounds relational agency, community-centered resistance, and the negotiation of power beyond Western feminist paradigms.

Further, this presentation examines how these texts engage with race, class, gender, and historical trauma, situating African women’s experiences within both continental and diasporic contexts. Beyond critique, these works function as radical sites of possibility, imagining alternative socio-political structures and asserting literature’s capacity to shape justice-oriented futures.

By centering African women’s fiction within larger literary and feminist discourses, this research contributes to scholarship in African Studies, gender studies, and postcolonial thought. Ultimately, it underscores storytelling as an intellectual and political act, demonstrating how African women writers transform literature into a space of resistance and world-making.

Zoom option: 

For those who are interested in participating virtually, the following is a Zoom link to the Seminar:
https://howard.zoom.us/j/88364581612?pwd=T0c3q2R8AGTaWLd3PZ4SqDUrpnuNp4.1