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identity

Just like couscous : Gender, agency and the politics of female circumcision in Cairo

Upphovsperson: Malmström, Maria Frederika
Utgivare: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet | Göteborg : University of Gothenburg
År: 2009
Ämnesord: anthropology, identity, gender, agency, embodiment, senses, body, sexuality, female circumcision, politics, Social change, performativity, practice, Political islam, Egypt, Middle East, North Africa
This dissertation explores how female gender identity is continually created and re-created in Egypt through a number of daily practices, of which female circumcision is central. In order to do so, the study inquires into the lived experiences and social meanings of female circumcision and femininity as narrated by women from lower class neighbourhoods in Cairo. The study seeks to understand how the experiences of femininity and female circumcision are shaped and challenged by the social and political changes that impinge on these women’s lives. Female circumcision has become a global political minefield with ‘Western’ interventions affecting Egyptian politics and social development, not least in the area of democracy and human rights. The global human rights discourse brings about change by portraying female circumcision as mutilation. These discourses and other political and social changes both in Egypt and elsewhere, such as modernization, the aftermath of 9/11 and regional instability have together begun to dis-embed female circumcision from its socio-cultural context. This thesis focuses upon the way in which these women understand and respond to these complex changes and it looks particularly at how different actors, in their construction of female identity, contest, resist, subvert or embrace female circumcision. The study explores how the subject is made through the interplay of global hegemonic structures of power and the most intimate sphere, which has been exposed in the international arena. The need to understand agency as the capacity to act according to the exigencies of the specific sociocultural forms the main premise of this dissertation; the Egyptian context comprises the complex interaction between the local and a variety of wider global forces.

Diasporas within and without Africa : dynamism, heterogeneity, variation

Medarbetare: Manger, Leif O. | Assal, Munzoul A. M.
Utgivare: Uppsala : Nordiska Afrikainstitutet
År: 2006
Ämnesord: Migration, internal migration, Migrants, human relations, Africans, identity, diaspora, Social anthropology/ethnography, Socialantrolopologi/etnografi
The book deals with two types of “African diasporas”, the first of which originated in the migration histories of the Indian Ocean and brought new groups into Africa. This is illustrated by case studies of Hadrami communities in Sudan and Zanzibar, and the Malay community in Cape Town, that produced trade links as well as processes of Islamization. The second type originated with the failing African states and cases discussed are an Eritrean diaspora in Germany, alongside Sudanese diasporas in Norway and the USA, and a Somali diaspora in Norway. The papers deal with processes of homemaking, political mobilization in the diaspora through local organisations, religious networks and cyberspace nationalism. The central conceptual argument is that “diaspora” is not only a post-modern reaction to the xenophobia of Western nation states but must be seen as part of a broader history of human migration and intercultural experience. This calls for a perspective which takes into consideration historically produced variation and dynamism.

Identity and beyond : rethinking Africanity

Medarbetare: Diagne, Souleymane Bachir | Melber, Henning | Mama, Amina | Nyamnjoh, Francis B.
Utgivare: Uppsala : Nordiska Afrikainstitutet
År: 2001
Ämnesord: identity, Political power, Gender analysis, Africa
This Discussion Paper presents the plenary presentations by the three main speakers during the Nordic Africa Days, with an introduction offering an overview and comment on the various approaches on Gender and Power in African Contexts, Africanity as an Open Question and Rethinking Power in Africa.

Tales of the nation : feminist nationalism or patriotic history?

Upphovsperson: Bull-Christiansen, Lene
Utgivare: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet | Uppsala : Nordiska Afrikainstitutet
År: 2004
Ämnesord: Zimbabwe, feminism, nationalism, identity, literature, Yvonne Vera, history, Matabeleland, SOCIAL SCIENCES, SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP
In light of the uses and misuses of history in Zimbabwean politics in recent years, this research report focuses on how versions of the country’s liberation war history have become a site of struggle over the definition of Zimbabwean national identity. As identity politics’often do, Zimbabwean nationalism draws on a wide field of cultural symbols of identity and political discourses of inclusion and exclusion. Therefore, the report takes a cross-disciplinary approach to the issue of national identity by mapping out the imaginary field of Zimbabwean nationalism. This approach opens up the possibility of cross-reading the political discourses of the President and the ruling party ZANU (PF) with opposing voices such as those in the works of the author Yvonne Vera. This cross-reading shows how Vera's novels and the political discourses participate in the struggle over Zimbabwean national identity by offering different versions of the nation’s history in the form of patriotic history, feminist nationalism, or narratives of difference. In this way the research report adds to our understanding of power and resistance in Zimbabwean politics of national identity.