Women Out of Africa

Introduction

In 1985, the film Out of Africa brought the life of Isak Dinesen, a member of Kenya’s White settler community, to popular attention in the United States. With Meryl Streep as the main character and Robert Redford as her lover, the film presented “Africa” as a backdrop to the loves and lives of White colonials in Kenya. With the exception of Malick Bowens in the role of Dinesen’s faithful servant, Farah, African people, including women, also featured as a collective backdrop, observing, obeying, and occasionally benefitting from the largesse of, the White main characters. Unfortunately, and despite ample evidence to the contrary, Western scholarly and popular discourses about actual African women before and after 1985 have cast them in the modes of passivity seen in the film and have also cast them as victims.

I started to realize those discourses’ systemic nature and influence in 1995 when I moved to the United States to begin my graduate studies and found the university library’s Women’s Studies Reading Room. I browsed the shelves, noting texts about women’s lives in relation to a range of areas from religion to psychoanalysis to literature. I wondered when I would come to texts about those areas of African women’s lives. There seemed to be almost none until I checked the card catalog and found texts on African women filed under “Development.” The most important issues regarding African women, it appeared, were poverty, illiteracy, and maternal mortality. Feminist scholars, it seemed, had nothing to say about African women in the areas of literature, religion, or psychoanalysis.

This confinement of feminist scholarship on the women of a vast and diverse continent to the singular and limiting category of Development spoke very strongly and alarmingly to me about what those in my new environment considered worth knowing about women like me. As I began to move more widely through the community, I found myself similarly limited by how others viewed me as a person from a place they called “Africa.” For many of my new acquaintances, colleagues, and professors, Africa was a place of interesting animals and poor, benighted people and nothing like Ghana, the part of Africa I called home and had recently left. In the United States, I found the Africa of the 1985 film as much at the university as in the local community. It was an Africa whose women were as marginal in scholarship as in popular imagination and culture.

The library classification system and my own personal experiences offered important lessons in the relation between naming and knowing. As my graduate studies began to introduce me to the work of feminist scholars, such as Chandra Mohanty, Patricia Hill Collins, and Sandra Harding; as the late Leigh Star introduced me to the relation between systems of classification and race, gender, and power; as I began to acquire the conceptual tools for theorizing the relation between power and knowledge, including between the global North and South; and as I discovered the library’s African Studies section as the main repository for the scholarship I had sought in vain in the Women’s Studies Reading Room, I came to understand the classification of African women and my own experiences as sites for the operation of power: the power to name and presume to know African women. Just as importantly, they were also sites that elicited African women’s power to reject those definitions.

In playing on the name of the 1985 film Out of Africa, this article returns the focus to African women not only on the continent but also, and especially, when they leave it. Unlike the portrayals of Black Kenyan women in the film as mostly absent or silent, the women who are the focus of this essay are not confined to lives of abjection and marginality in a romanticized and primitive Africa waiting for European and North American discovery and rescue. They include women who move out of Africa, sometimes for good, sometimes for shorter sojourns as they move back and forth between the continent and locations abroad. These women are transnational subjects in a global 21st century and members of newer African diasporas distinct from, but related to, older African diasporas created by transatlantic slavery. They are, quite literally, women out of Africa who subvert the dominant meanings of “Africa.”

My goal in this article is to examine transnational African women’s subjectivity as they move back and forth between African nations, North America, and Western Europe. In particular, I look at the ways that African women are named in and through Western media discourse and knowledge production. If, following Foucault (1972), we think of the Western popular and scholarly naming of African women as discourses, those discourses do not only construct knowledge but also produce diasporic African women as subjects. That is, they set the conditions for the kinds of people they can be (Foucault, 1972; Rabinow, 1984). I examine this discursive production of African women’s subjectivity, as well as the kinds of subjectivity they assert in response to, or in defiance of, those discourses as they move transnationally. Although my analysis is informed by Foucault’s (1972) work on discourse, knowledge, subjectivity, and power, I also draw on African feminist studies, African diaspora studies, and migration studies. In the process, I seek to fill the gap in communication and cultural scholarship on African women’s subjectivity.

Despite their transnational mobility that locates them in cities around the world, the members of more recent African diasporas are almost invisible in mainstream Western scholarship and popular culture, except when they undertake their journeys on the terms dictated for them by discourses of the victimhood that is assumed by so many in Europe and North America to be the basic status of African women. In those discourses, African women are victims of poverty, war, or bizarre “traditional” practices. Indeed, transnational African women’s very mobility may bring them more directly in touch with such discourses than is the case for African women living on the continent. They may be women out of Africa, but their subjectivity is constrained by the naming and knowing that they confront. As such, they attract most attention and interest in Western public spheres when they seek asylum in Western nations because of risk from practices such as female genital cutting in their nations of origin, or because of conflicts that devastate their home communities. ¹ Whether fleeing “traditional” practices or social and political upheaval, transnational African women who make the news in Western cultural spaces—especially mainstream media—are those who can most readily confirm their assigned identity as victims first, and everything else second.

There is a large body of work on African women and some of the most important work in this area has come from African feminist scholars in collections such as those edited by Steady (1981) and Imam, Mama, and Sow (1997). It can also be found in more in-depth studies by Oyewumi (1997), Nfah-Abbenyi (1997), and Nzegwu (2006). However, when African women leave the continent, their lives seem to drop off the scholarly radar almost entirely. They seldom figure in scholarship on women in the African diaspora, in part because of a mid-20th-century epistemological and institutional break between continental and U.S.-based Black scholars that resulted in a separation between African diaspora studies and African studies.

In her discussion of that break, Pierre (2013) documents developments in the post–World War II United States that supported the institutionalization of African studies (among other “area studies”) and African American studies as separate intellectual domains. This drew resources away from, and also marginalized, earlier “Transcontinental” approaches that emphasized the structural links between continental and diasporic Africa. That separation reinforced the colonial pattern of studying Africa as fixed in time and tradition, effectively locating it outside modernity.

The separation also located the continent outside race, which was linked with transatlantic slavery and the African diaspora created by slavery. Race was, therefore, located intellectually within African American studies. As Pierre (2013) notes, African diaspora studies continues to reify the mid-century divide that cast the continent as a site outside history and race. As a result of this break, the African diaspora is typically conceived as created by the transatlantic slave trade, despite the existence of more recent diasporas that include women from all over the continent who travel back and forth between Africa and other world regions.

There is an extensive body of scholarship on women in the older African diaspora created by the slave trade and its enforced transfer of millions of Africans to the Americas. That scholarship ranges from the work of 19th-century figures such as Maria Stewart (Richardson, 1987) and the educator, Anna Julia Cooper (1892), to the work of more recent scholars and activists, such as Angela Davis (1981), Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (1982), Audre Lorde (1984/2007), and Kimberle Crenshaw (1991).

Scholarship on women in the more recent diasporas of the 20th and early 21st centuries tends to be in the field of migration studies rather than African diaspora studies, and very little of that scholarship deals with diasporic African women’s subjectivity in relation to dominant Euro-American discourses about them. Although the narrow conceptualization of the African diaspora has limited the amount of scholarship on women in these more recent diasporic movements, there are some important exceptions, including the work of Mama (1995), Davies (2013), and Wright (2015). Additional examples can be found in the work of scholars such as Beoku-Betts and Njami (2005), Coly (2008), and Rodriguez, Tsikata, and Adomako-Ampofo (2015)

Although most of these scholars are currently based in the United States, they all bridge different transnational locations in their personal and scholarly trajectories. For example, in her book, Caribbean Spaces: Escapes From Twilight Zones, Davies (2013) maps her path between Trinidad and Tobago, Nigeria, Brazil, and the United States. Davies and scholars like her who have made significant contributions to the study of women in the African diaspora vary in the extent to which they examine the lives of African women in later diasporas, but they all expand both the analytical frameworks and geographical scope of work that focuses on earlier African diasporas in the United States.

This article adds to this scholarship by offering a focused study of African women as they move transnationally and confront the Western discourses that name and construct knowledge about them. In addition to the works listed above, it also draws on the theoretical insights of African and transnational feminist scholars such as Oyewumi (1997) and Mohanty (1991), who have examined how the subjectivity of women from Africa and other parts of the global south has been produced historically and in the present in mainstream feminist discourses about them in North America and Western Europe.

In the discussion that follows, I look at knowledge production in Western discourses about African women—both on the continent and in the earlier diasporas created by the slave trade. I highlight the structural nature of such knowledge production as a mechanism of dominance of African women in multiple locations across time, and also as the source of dominant discourses about African and African-descended women generally and as subjects. Following this, I discuss African and transnational feminist scholars’ challenges to such knowledge production and construction of African women and their subjectivity.

Next, I examine specific instances of African women’s encounters with discourses about them as they move between African and North American locations. I also examine those women’s responses to those discourses. Keeping in mind the insights of scholars such as Akyeampong (2000) on the existence of multiple African diasporas, I make a distinction between two main diasporas. The first is the African diaspora created through the transatlantic slave trade. The journey across the Atlantic Ocean featured in that trade as the “Middle Passage” in enslaved Africans’ transportation to the Americas. The Middle Passage has, therefore, become a shorthand term for transatlantic slavery in African diasporic discourse and scholarship including Wright’s (2015) Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology.

The second diaspora that I discuss is composed of Africans who moved to Europe and the Americas following the Second World War, as African nations gained independence from European colonial powers. As I show in my discussion, the distinction between these diasporas is an important one because it structures the ways that Africans in the two diasporas are positioned in Europe and North America. In the United States, for example, members of the newer African diaspora are sometimes cast as “model minorities” and pitted against Africans from the earlier diaspora.

My examination focuses mainly on women in this second, newer, diaspora but also includes members of the older African diaspora. I analyze blogs by African women in both diasporas in Europe and North America, a panel discussion convened by Essence magazine and featured in its August 2015 edition, and a few examples from my own experience. ² I conclude with a discussion of what we learn about transnational African women’s subjectivity—both as it is shaped by dominant Western discourses about Africa and as they craft it in relation to those discourses.

Naming and Knowing African Women: From Colonial Science to Modernization Theory

When Europeans first began transoceanic journeys that took them to Africa and the Americas, they relied on Christianity to explain the difference between themselves and the people they encountered in those continents. For example, Europeans claimed the status of children of God who were, by that token, both distinct from and superior to the “Others” they encountered (Omi & Winant, 1994). They used such claims to justify imperial projects that took over extensive areas of Africa and the Americas, and that enslaved and transported Africans across the Atlantic to provide labor in European colonial territories in the Americas.

Christian justifications were replaced in the 18th and 19th centuries by “scientific” ones with the rise of the European Enlightenment and its norms of knowledge production under the rubric of “science.” When it came to the study of non-European peoples who were brought under European imperial control, such science established the idea of race and racial hierarchies that placed Europeans above all others in the human order and thereby served to justify dominance (Omi & Winant, 1994).

Two features of the knowledge produced about African women in the 19th century have left enduring traces that African feminist scholars still contend with. The first was a focus on African women’s sexuality and the construction of that sexuality as perverse. Discourses of African women’s sexual perversion served to support the view that Africans were subhuman, and the public display in European cities of the South African woman, Sara Baartman, constituted one of the most egregious results of this view (Arnfred, 2004; Mama, 1995). Baartman’s body was “studied” before and after her death, with the strongest interest focused on her genitalia. Such “scientific” study bolstered the view of African women as creatures of sexual excess, a view that served to justify both their dehumanization and sexual exploitation.

A second feature of knowledge about African women was its gendered production and consequences resulting from that. Nineteenth-century colonial encounters on the continent occurred most directly between men, with African men serving as the main informants for male Europeans who sought to study African societies and cultures. A number of African feminist scholars have noted how male African informants conveyed information about local traditions in ways that increased their own patriarchal dominance. For example, in her study of shifts in Igbo society in Nigeria, Nzegwu (2006) describes patriarchal dominance as something that was introduced during the British colonial period into societies previously characterized by the coexistence of patrilineal lineage and female autonomy.

Such shifts to patriarchy were facilitated by 19th-century European views about domesticity as the appropriate sphere for women. As Obbo (1980) has observed, one concrete result of this was that women were barred from European-dominated towns, where job opportunities were reserved for men. Between African male opportunism and conservative European gender norms, African women were largely relegated to the background in both the restructuring of their societies and knowledge produced about those societies during the colonial period. Those modes of knowledge production and social restructuring persisted long after the formal end of colonization in the mid-20th century.

Since the mid-20th century, development studies has continued the colonial tradition of viewing and studying African and other non-Western societies primarily in terms of attributes that they are deemed to lack. Prior to the end of slavery and colonization, members of those societies were described using terms that drew a distinction between them and the societies that subjugated them. Those terms cast the people of dominant societies as “civilized” and those of subject territories as “barbaric” or “primitive.” In the mid-20th century, these categories of civilized/primitive gave way to the new binaries of “modern/traditional,” and “developed/underdeveloped,” as modernization theories became the dominant conceptual lens for the study of newly independent African nations and other parts of the global South.

Modernization theories underpinned mid-20th-century development studies and placed “developing” nations on an evolutionary path to the “modernization” achieved by Western industrialized nations. With a striking neglect of the structural roots of so much so-called underdevelopment in the economic and other social changes wrought by colonization, modernization theorists, such as Lerner (1958) and Schramm (1964), respectively, identified individual psychological characteristics and national policies as the prerequisites needed to achieve modernization in developing societies. For example, Lerner argued that individual members of traditional societies needed to possess “mobile personalities” (Lerner, 1958, pp. 47-52) for their societies to become modern, whereas Schramm identified key areas that needed to be included in development plans for such plans to be effective. Until the 1970s, development studies also retained patriarchal colonial assumptions that identified men as the primary actors in development in African and other developing societies. Until then, women, in development discourses, were regarded as mere “helpers” to men (Boateng, 2001).

Following the publication of Boserup’s (1970) study highlighting the role of women in economic development, the field of “Women in Development” or WID emerged and marked a turn from “welfare” views of women to a focus on “equity.” Although limited by the conservative epistemology of liberal feminism that assumed the equality of all members of a society and, therefore, did not seek to challenge male dominance, this was an important advancement. It was soon superseded by a focus on “anti-poverty” that cast women in developing societies (including African nations) as victims of both tradition and underdevelopment. As reflected in the Women’s Studies Reading Room catalog at my alma mater 20 years ago, subjectivity and other dimensions of women’s lives in Africa and other “developing” regions took a back seat to what were considered to be the “basic needs” issues of access to water, education, health care, and income-generating opportunities. Although such needs were, and continue to be, important, the exclusive focus on them obscured other equally important dimensions of women’s lives in Africa and other parts of the global South, including women’s cultural production and social roles.

By the mid-1980s, the focus in WID was beginning to shift to “empowerment” frameworks aimed not just at addressing the basic needs of women in the global South, but also empowering them to challenge local and national structures of power. This period also marked a shift from WID to GAD (gender and development), reflecting the rising importance of the concept of gender. Despite the shift to empowerment, and given the practical difficulty of dismantling long-standing structures of power, “anti-poverty” and “basic needs” frameworks remain deeply entrenched in organizing scholarship on African women. The strength of development, as the primary framework for studying the lives of African women, is not limited to Western scholarship and institutions but is also reflected in research agendas on the African continent.

A number of African feminist scholars have noted the externally driven research agendas that play important roles in determining the kind of scholarship produced about African women (Lewis, 2004; Mama, 1997). Mama notes, for example, factors such as the dominance of “economics and . . . technocratic approaches to development [that are], dedicated to the service of national and international policymakers and bureaucracies of the development industry” ( 1997, p. 76) These, she argues,

have made Development Studies less amenable to detailed and necessarily time-consuming scholarly research and theoretical production; indeed to intellectual work that is not immediately relevant to practical concerns and to solving problems identified by development projects. Methodological approaches are largely reductionist and empiricist with little attention to the more humanistic concerns of subjectivity and culture. (Mama, 1997, p. 76)

Institutions, such as the Council for the Development of Economic and Social Research in Africa (CODESRIA) in Senegal and the Africa Gender Institute in South Africa, have opened up spaces for work that is less narrowly focused than the research agendas identified by Mama almost 20 years ago. However, the economic constraints faced by many of the continent’s nations suggest that the overall context of African knowledge production has not changed significantly.

As a result of structural factors such as those identified by Mama (1997), African women’s subjectivity on and off the continent is often produced by discourses emerging from scholarship whose goals do not always reflect local priorities or perspectives. The construction of African women in scholarly discourse, therefore, imposes on them a perverse exceptionalism in which their lives are significant mainly for their distance from the norms of the West. In essence, as Mbembe (2001) has pointed out, Africa exists as the negation of the West.

In recent decades, the lives of women on the continent have also been shaped by policy decisions originating in the West. For example, as noted by several scholars including Manuh (1994), Adomako-Ampofo (2007), and Osirim (2007), structural adjustment policies have had adverse consequences for women in many African nations. As a result, both scholarly and policy factors intersect to produce African women as existing under conditions unknown elsewhere despite the insights of scholars such as Mbembe (2007) and Bakare-Yusuf (2004). These scholars have observed that rather than existing apart from the West, Africa has long been co-constitutive of it. What such dominant perspectives obscure are, first, the interactions between Africa and the West in producing the realities of the continent and, second, the locally variable responses of African women to those realities.

Self-Naming, Self-Knowing: The View From African Feminism

The work of Africanist and African feminist scholars in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has emerged as an important source of challenges to neo-colonial and development-driven research on African women. ³ Working in institutions in Africa, Europe, and North America, scholars such as Oyewumi (1997), Nzegwu (2006), and Adomako-Ampofo (2007) have produced an abundance of research on the complexity of continental African women’s lives. Such scholarship provides important theoretical tools for challenging the narrow frameworks that have constrained and dominated much scholarship on African women. It also points to dimensions of African women’s subjectivity that are obscured in mainstream Western feminism.

One can identify parallels between Foucault’s (1972) insights into the relation between knowledge, power, and subjectivity, on one hand, and the work of transnational and feminist scholars including Mohanty (1991), Oyewumi (1997), and Achebe and Teboh (2007) on the other. Although these feminist and transnational scholars do not draw directly on Foucault in their work, they identify links between knowledge production and power and have challenged the limits of Western feminist knowledge production about women of the global South. In her pathbreaking essay, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Mohanty (1991) notes the universalizing Western feminist constructions of the category of “woman” and uncritical standards of methodological proof that led to narrow conceptions of the “average Third World woman.” She further observes,

This average Third World woman leads an essentially truncated life based on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and her being “Third World” (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimized, etc.). This, I suggest, is in contrast to the (implicit) self-representation of Western women as educated, as modern, as having control over their bodies and sexualities and the freedom to make their own decisions. (Mohanty, 1991, p. 56)

If Mohanty challenges the universalizing uses of the category of “woman” in Western feminist frameworks, the African feminist scholar, Oyewumi (1997) goes further and argues that “woman” and “gender” are categories that have little theoretical value in the context of Yoruba society in Nigeria. Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes” was first published in 1986 and has been followed by a large body of scholarship challenging Eurocentric knowledge construction about women of the global South. Yet, the limited and limiting perceptions persist and produce women of the global South as a global category and African women as a homogenized regional one.

As suggested by the title of Mohanty’s (1991) essay, there is a continuity between such knowledge production and colonization, which was justified by constructing subject populations as inferior and in need of the colonizers’ civilizing control. Most significantly, scholars such as Mohanty and Oyewumi (1997) draw our attention to the continuities between mainstream Western feminist scholarship of the late 20th century and the colonial and developmentalist frameworks of older traditions of knowledge production.

Emerging at a time when most African nations had just gained their independence, mainstream Western feminism contrasted sharply with some versions of Black and Third World feminism in its knowledge production and discourses about African and other Third World women. That contrast was highlighted by Audre Lorde in her rebuke to Mary Daly for Daly’s narrow characterization of African women only as victims of female genital cutting, and failure to discuss the feminist importance of historical African female figures (Lorde, 1984/2007). Indeed, the emergence of Black feminism as a distinct field was both a response and rebuke to the blindness of much mainstream Western feminism to its own assumptions about race, class, and empire.

African feminist scholars have expanded Lorde’s critique of dominant Western feminist frameworks for the study of African women. Some of the most important work in this area includes Oyewumi’s (1997) assertion that seniority is more appropriate than gender for understanding the lives of women in Yoruba society in Nigeria. Although this claim has been challenged by other African feminist scholars such as Bakare-Yusuf (2004), Oyeronke has been joined by other African feminists who, while acknowledging the theoretical value of gender, have shown that in the African context, it operates in conjunction with other factors (including seniority). African feminists from Obbo (1980) and Mama (1997) to Nzegwu (2006), have also noted the need to take into account the ways in which the gendered organization of African societies were reshaped under colonization (including educational systems that taught women “domestic” subjects, and economic structures that provided employment to men and not to women).

Scholars, such as Nfah-Abbenyi (1997) and Nnaemeka (2005), have also pointed to the differing bases of women’s struggles in different African societies. For example, where Western feminists such as Betty Friedan identified motherhood as oppressive, African feminists have pointed out its value as a source of empowerment for women in many African societies (Nfah-Abbenyi, 1997). Similarly, in distinction to radical feminism’s identification of patriarchy as the primary source of women’s subjugation, African feminists have often refused an exclusive focus on patriarchy that casts men as their main adversary (Nnaemeka, 2005). They point to additional sources of women’s subjugation, such as colonial and postcolonial economic restructuring that have had adverse consequences for both men and women in African societies. African feminists have also highlighted the importance of local institutions—such as women’s religious and other social groups—in creating spaces of female autonomy in African societies (Achebe & Teboh, 2007; Amadiume, 1987).

Another important area of African feminist scholarship is the relation between the status of women and external factors. If colonization facilitated patriarchal distortions in many African societies (such as the exclusion of women from economic activity), more recent global forces have also shaped the challenges that African women face. In particular, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund’s globalization of neo-liberal economic policies originating in the United States in the 1980s, has led to a contraction in economic opportunities for women in African nations subjected to those policies. The main policy initiative behind these developments is “structural adjustment,” and its adverse impacts for women have been documented in scholarship spanning the late 20th and early 21st centuries (Adomako-Ampofo, 2007; Manuh, 1994; Osirim, 2007). Structural adjustment policies have withdrawn state support for social services often leaving women and girls to take up the slack, for example, in providing health care for families.

In an article on Ghanaian women’s migration to Canada in the late 20th century, Donkor (2005) identifies the adverse economic impacts of structural adjustment as a key factor in women’s decision to migrate. What is striking in the work of Donkor and others who have written about the response of women from different African nations to structural adjustment is those women’s ability to create new opportunities that secure their own and their families’ livelihoods. In Zimbabwe, for example, Osirim (2007) shows how the crocheting and knitting skills that were taught to Zimbabwean women based on colonial views on appropriate female occupations, have become the basis for women’s microenterprise projects in the face of shrinking opportunities in formal employment. Many Zimbabwean women turned to the production and sale of knitted and crocheted goods when structural adjustment programs placed additional constraints on women’s access to formal sector employment.

Darkwah’s (2002) scholarship on Ghanaian market women is also instructive in complicating the developmentalist view of formal education as the optimum path to upward mobility. In her essay, “Trading Goes Global: Ghanaian Market Women in an Era of Globalization,” she provides case studies of Ghanaian women with advantages of college educations and white-collar employment who find trading in local markets more attractive for a range of reasons, including increased earnings as well as greater flexibility in managing family demands. Although these women operate at the upper end of the hierarchy of market trading in Ghana and travel across the globe to procure goods, their stories are important for pointing to the ways that optimum choices for Ghanaian women do not always map onto the trajectories suggested by standard modernization and development frameworks.

The work of scholars, such as Darkwah (2002), Osirim (2007), and others, locate African women in structural economic conditions that are indicative of neo-colonial global arrangements rather than hermetically sealed conditions of African tradition and poverty. Both those conditions and some African women’s responses to them (such as the global trade documented by Darkwah, and migration discussed by Donkor) are indicative of African women’s creative responses to the challenges facing them as well as their location in both global economic structures and global networks of migration and trade. Above all, such responses point to modes of subjectivity that contradict dominant narratives of victimhood and passivity.

The work of African feminists, anchored in the specificities of women’s lives in different African nations, serves as an important corrective to the dominant feminist and developmentalist frameworks outlined earlier. However, although local political, cultural, and economic contexts are important for understanding the specificity of African women’s lives, that specificity translates all too often into peculiarity “under Western eyes.” As a result, contemporary Western scholarship continues to construct African women as “other.” For example, Arnfred (2004) has noted the ways that African women’s sexuality continues to be construed as perverse and pathological among some scholars of HIV/AIDS in Africa.

Yet, factors such as community and family networks, along with national and local histories, are important determinants of African women’s subjectivity and can serve as resources for contesting narrow discourses when those women move in transnational networks beyond the continent. For example, Williams-Forson (2014) notes some African migrants’ use of foodways in renegotiating power with host countries “particularly if a boundary needs to be maintained” (Williams-Forson, 2014, p. 78). She notes that this renegotiation occurs as migrants seek to preserve their customs around food even while “fostering innovation and creativity, inventing cultural traditions, and constructing new food knowledge” (Williams-Forson, 2014, p. 78). In such cases, diasporic communities assert and seek to validate their difference from host cultures, rather than simply complying with demands to assimilate into those cultures. With few exceptions, however, transnational African women’s subjectivity is relatively marginal in African feminist scholarship.

An important exception to this marginality is Mama’s (1995) Beyond the Masks: Race, Gender and Subjectivity, a study that stands as a strong counter to the colonial and developmentalist scholarly discourses that have produced African women’s subjectivity as inferior, sexually perverse, and abject. Based on Mama’s activism with, and study of, Black women in Britain in the 1980s, the book draws on Foucault’s work on the discursive production of subjects to illuminate the operations of the discourses of empire that Black women encounter in Britain.

Trained as a psychologist, Mama also discusses the near absence of African women in both dominant Western and oppositional Black psychology. She further challenges Frantz Fanon’s attempts at offering a psychological account of African women’s subjectivity. In his book, Black Skin White Masks, Fanon (1967) reduced Black women’s subjectivity to the desire to be White. Mama does not only offer a substantive argument against this narrow characterization of Black women’s subjectivity but also signals the strength of her rejection in the title of her book.

Writing against the grain of both Fanon and the discourses of empire, Mama (1995) undertakes a careful analysis of the historical production of Black women as inferior subjects in European scholarly discourses and imperial projects. She then examines the ways that women of the African diaspora in 1980s Britain encountered racist and sexist discourses about them, informed by the false knowledge established in colonial times. In some cases, they encountered those discourses in themselves and from their own family members.

For example, Mama gives examples of some Black British women’s internalization of the assumed inferiority of their race. That internalization is sometimes strongest in older generations of Black British women whose response to British racism is to conform as much as possible to dominant White standards of behavior as well as physical appearance and clothing, and to demand that conformity of their daughters. As a result, for younger generations of Black British women facing such pressure to conform and assimilate, rejecting the subjectivity assigned to them by dominant discourses sometimes involves psychologically fraught struggles with significant family members. Mama also notes the resources that some Black British women draw upon in resisting discourses of their inferiority. For some, being born to parents from the Caribbean, or to at least one parent from an African nation, lead to differing levels of ease in crafting alternative subjectivities. For women with family links to African societies’ alternative conceptions of beauty and normalcy regarding body type and skin color, it is sometimes easier to reject dominant White British narratives of female beauty than it is for women with no such access to a set of alternatives.

Other African feminist scholars have undertaken similar analyses of, and challenges to, intersecting discourses of sexism and racism in the United States and Europe (Achebe & Teboh, 2007; Beoku-Betts & Njami, 2005; Coly, 2008; Rodriguez & Boahene, 2012). ⁴ But 20 years after its publication, Mama’s (1995) study stands apart as a rare in-depth study of African diasporic women’s subjectivity that offers a sustained critique of both the omissions and errors of scholarship on the subjectivity of women of African descent.

Twilight Zones: Naming and Knowing in the Spaces of Diaspora

In her study of African women’s migration to Ireland, Shandy (2008) notes that those women’s reasons for migration are “complex, multiple and shifting” (p. 812). Those shifting reasons complicate standard notions of African women’s transnational mobility—especially in the United States where the dominant idea of migration views it as a one-way path from one nation (including national belonging and citizenship) to another, superior, one. That is, as a kind of international upward mobility. However, scholars identify African women’s migration as a more complex phenomenon that is better characterized as “transmigration” in which movement is multi-directional and original national affinities are not necessarily transferred to host nations (Schiller, Basch, & Blanc, 1995).

Schiller et al. (1995) have noted disapproval of multi-directional transmigration in some official U.S. quarters because of the questions it raises about migrants’ loyalty to the United States. However, the concept of “transmigration” more adequately captures the movements of African diasporic women today. Williams-Forson (2014) draws on this view of migration when she characterizes Ghanaian migrants in the United States as “trans-migrants” who, rather than “illustrating patterns of uprootedness . . . are already in a transient state of rootedness in multiple places” (p. 73). Transmigration, she further notes, accounts for such migrants’ sense of themselves as members of two societies. The idea of transmigration shifts from a conception of migration as linear and involving a permanent move from one location to another, to a view of migration as bridging multiple locations rather than, in effect, burning the bridges that link migrants to their nations of origin.

In the course of my own sojourn in the United States, I have encountered a number of discourses about African women that I examine more deeply in this section to address the discursive production of diasporic African women’s subjectivity as well as their resistance to those discourses. Although I reflect on my experiences, my main focus is on the observations and experiences of other African diasporic women. I draw mostly on blogs by women in newer African diasporas in the United States, Canada, and Britain. However, I also include a post by an African American woman and the issues that arise around her subjectivity as a member of an older diaspora when she moves from the United States to Mozambique. I further examine a debate between women of different African diasporas in the United States that was featured in the August 2015 edition of Essence magazine.

My discussion of my own and other African diasporic women’s experience is informed by Davies’s (2013) idea of “twilight zones.” Davies describes twilight zones as

spaces of transformation from one condition to another, one location to another, one reality to another, and the sometimes newly created emotional, physical, and conceptual space that then becomes another identified location. Twilight zones can therefore be scary spaces of loss but also of gain. (Davies, 2013, pp. 11-12)

Twilight zones’ emphasis on instability as a condition of diaspora is productive for thinking about diasporic African women’s subjectivity in ways that escape and exceed limited and limiting discourses of victimhood and migration. That instability arises in part from the exclusion of both Africa and recent African diasporas from the extensive scholarship on older African diasporas. As a result, the challenge is also one of epistemology for those who seek to understand the links between subjectivities in old and new diasporas.

Scholars such as Wright (2015), Goyal (2014), and Pierre (2013), have all pointed out the need to transcend the limitations of African diaspora studies in the “Black Atlantic” tradition launched by Gilroy’s influential book of that name. As Goyal notes, The Black Atlantic “replicated the problematic exclusion of Africa from discussions of modernity” (Goyal, 2014, p. v). She further identifies this exclusion not as an exception in Black Atlantic studies but as a trend that has drawn criticism from Africanist scholars. Similarly, in a reference to the emphasis on the role of slavery in the creation of older African diasporas, Wright identifies the focus on those diasporas as “middle-passage epistemology” (Wright, 2015). As Wright explains it, middle passage epistemology accounts for Blackness and Black struggle in a singular and linear historical narrative that begins with the Atlantic slave trade (with the crossing of the Atlantic Ocean being the middle passage in slaves’ forcible transportation to the Americas). While acknowledging its value, Wright also points to the limits of a middle passage conception of Blackness in accounting for the multiple histories of Black people and Black identities in the United States today.

In exploring the subjectivity of women in newer African diasporas, then, I seek to highlight the ways that women in these diasporas challenge the subjectivities imposed by dominant Western discourses about them, while also responding to the imperative identified by Michelle Wright to transcend the middle passage epistemology that has dominated African diaspora studies in the United States. I discuss three main themes that emerge from my examination of blogs and the Essence forum: victimhood, racism, and model minorities, and draw on Davies’s (2013) idea of “twilight zones” to organize my discussion of those themes. I seek to understand the “twilight zone” in which women in African diasporas encounter dominant discourses about them. This is because, following from Davies insights, it is in those zones that diasporic subjectivities are both disrupted and recreated. I then consider those spaces’ potential for loss or gain in the course of that disruption and recreation of subjectivity. I do so on the basis of diasporic African women’s responses to dominant discourses about them in their host societies—either by capitulating to those discourses, or crafting alternative resistant selves. I also conceive of twilight zones as spaces for forming strategies for political and epistemological alliances between women in new and older African diasporas. Such alliances are important because, as I show in the following discussion, all too often members of older diasporas exist in tension with members of newer ones.

Conclusion

I started this exploration with a focus on transnational African women and their subjectivity, as produced in their new locations by hegemonic discourses about them and as they produce it in resistance to those discourses. However, the blog posts of African women in new and old diasporas point to mobility itself as an important factor to take into account in examining diasporic African women’s subjectivity. That is, belonging in one or the other diaspora is not the only factor that raises issues of subjectivity for these women. As a result although questions of subjectivity may appear settled for women in older diasporas, transnational mobility reanimates subjectivity as a site of struggle in new and sometimes unexpected ways, for example, when it destabilizes racial self-identification. Mobility leads to challenges and responses to subjectivity regardless of belonging in older or earlier diasporas.

An additional factor to take into account is the ways that women in different African diasporas are situated in hegemonic discourses. The discursive production of Africans in newer diasporas in the United States as “model minorities,” in contradistinction to the African American members of older diasporas, raises challenges of subjectivity for both groups more than it provides grounds for self-congratulation by those in newer diasporas. Model minority discourses can only function by effacing the achievements of older African diasporas and by absolving the structural and discursive sites of White supremacy of responsibility for the location of members of all African diasporas in contemporary U.S. society. Rather than addressing deep-seated problems of race and racism, model minority discourses of newer African diasporas invite newer minorities into subjectivities that are approved in dominant U.S. racial culture as long as they stop short of challenging or disrupting White supremacy. Therefore, model minority discourses and their resulting subjectivities are, ultimately, constrained and hegemonic for Africans in newer diasporas.

The location of Africans of different diasporas within and outside model minority discourses in the United States also points to the ways that hegemonic discourses can simultaneously produce different kinds of subjects. Model minority discourses add a political charge to the temporal difference between diasporas and feed a narrow “middle passage epistemology” in which older African diasporas may feel doubly oppressed by historical structures of racism and the valorized Blackness of Africans in newer diasporas. As a result, as Wright (2015) has observed, the location of newer diasporas in the same structures of racism is obscured.

Long after the end of formal territorial colonization and challenges to scholarship and policies anchored in modernization theories, knowledge about African women in Western, and especially U.S. discourses, continues to construct their subjectivity in terms that constrain who they are and who they can be. African feminist scholars have actively contested such knowledge and the ways that it produces African women as subjects. Scholars such as Mama (1995), as this essay illustrated, have also examined African women’s subjectivity when they leave the continent and travel along transnational circuits to other regions. This article adds to this scholarship by highlighting the importance of mobility not only from, but also to, Africa for reanimating struggles of subjectivity for women in different African diasporas. Women from both old and new African diasporas find their subjectivity unsettled anew when they leave the United States, Britain, and Canada for Africa. Their journeys, too, pass through twilight zones of destabilization and possibility as they find their Blackness both questioned and valorized. These insights deepen our understanding of diasporic African women’s subjectivity in the early 21st century.