Fall 2011 Bulletin Vol. 27, Number 1 (PDF) - Center for Gender in ...

According to Swai, these knowledges make themselves available for both transcending and reproducing women’s current socialposion.Beyond Women’s Empowerment in Africa is a richly detailed argument for reconsidering what we, as scholars and as acvists,mean by “women’s empowerment.” Rather than taking economic, social, and educaonal intervenon iniaves at face value,Swai interrogates these programs for their complexies to underscore how outside intervenons are never just imposed; theyalways meet local pracces to produce unintended consequences. By combining archival and ethnographic material, Swai showswhat “women’s empowerment” means to various actors in variegated sites and queries its putave benefits. Swai combines theinsights of western social theorists (e.g. Foucault, Bourdieu, and Vygotsky) with those of African and Africanist feminists (e.g.Hunt, Kanogo, Oyewumi) to produce an argument equally influenced by feminist and sociological theory. As such, this text will beof interest to those in many fields including development studies, gender studies, and African studies.Throughout the text, Swai is also refreshingly self-reflexive, which is especially important given her own subject-posion as aneducated Tanzanian woman gives her paradoxically both great closeness to and an impassable distance from her informants.In this way, she pays homage to the feminist insistence that one must situate herself in order to tell the most authenc story.In Swai’s own words: “The strength of this endeavor is to help us understand that ‘African woman’ is a cultural-historicalconstrucon, which scholars have taken as truthful and real” (11).ReferencesAllman, Jean, Susan Geiger, and Nakanyike Musisi, Eds. (2002). Women in African Colonial Histories. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff (1991). Of Revoluon and Revelaon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Gilligan, Carol (1982). In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Hodgson, Dorothy (2005). The Church of Women: Gendered Encounters between Maasai and Missionaries. Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress.Hunt, Nancy Rose (1990). “Domescity and Colonialism in Belgian Africa: Usumbura’s Foyer Social, 1946-1960.” Signs 15(3): 447-74. Spring.Kanogo, Tabitha (2005). African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya 1900-1950. Athens: Ohio University Press.Odora-Hoppers, Catherine, Ed. (2002). Indigenous Knowledge and the Integraon of Knowledge Systems: Towards a Philosophy ofArculaon. Claremonth, South Africa: New Africa Educaon.Oyewumi, Oyeronke (2003). “Abiyamo: Theorizing African Motherhood.” Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women’s Studies (4).Thomas, Lynn (2003). Polics of the Womb: Women, Reproducon, and the State in Kenya. Berkeley: University of California Press.BOOK REVIEW29