Feminist Parenting: Perspectives from Africa and Beyond March 11, 2020
Feminist Parenting: Perspectives from Africa and Beyond asks and considers: What is feminist parenting? Is it something for all parents? What does it mean to be a feminist parent in practice? The collection aims to fill a gap on feminist parenting in the existing literature by bringing timely non-Eurocentric perspectives. More specifically, the anthology’s main contribution is to broadcast reflections and experiences that emanate primarily from voices that are often overlooked in global feminist discourses: those of African women (and men), living on the continent or in the diaspora, and from others born and raised or currently living in the Global South.
The 30 contributors from diverse backgrounds, walks of life and countries gathered in this anthology share powerful responses to the above questions by narrating their experiences of some of the challenges, dilemmas, promises and compromises of parenting with a feminist perspective. The volume is one of the first collections that collates first-person essays that describe the authors’ touching, beautiful and sometimes painful journeys of becoming feminist parents. In doing so, the authors of this book aim at (re)claiming parenting as a necessarily political terrain for sub-version, radical transformation and resistance to patriarchal oppression and sexism.
Demeter Press is thrilled to announce the publication of Feminist Parenting: Perspectives from Africa and Beyond: 360 pages (March 30, 2020 publication date); Price: $39.95 Cdn/ $26 US; ISBN: 978-1-77258-228-4
Available as a print and ebook
http://demeterpress.org/books/feminist-parenting-perspectives-from-africa-and-beyond/
With this moving collection, Rama Salla Dieng and Andrea O’Reilly manage to assemble diverse voices in a stirring, necessary and powerful feminist reclamation of the historically invisibilised labour of mothering and parenting. The essays cut across racial, gender, queer, and geographical difference, raising difficult questions regarding what it means to parent as a feminist, and how feminism shapes our experiences and aspirations of parenting. The narratives are beautifully told and deeply personal, and the questions they raise, myriad. The realizations of longing, sacrifice, solidarity, love, compromise, intimacy, guilt, despondency, triumph and joy that these stories reveal will be familiar to every feminist.
—LYN OSSOME, Senior Research Fellow, Makerere Institute of Social Research
Who and how to be a feminist parent in Africa and beyond? To these questions, Feminist Parenting: Perspectives from Africa and Beyond gives several answers or rather offers perspectives anchored in places and contexts which reflect intimate, socio-cultural, religious, political, and personal representations. What makes this book original and rich are the confrontations and connections between analyses of family and parenting through a feminist lens. The contributions have led the authors to reconsider the meaning of feminism in Africa, its theories and practices in this very beautiful anthology.
—DR FATOU SOW, Professor of Sociology, National Center for Scientific Research (France) / Cheikh Anta Diop University (Senegal)
This moving and insightful collection opens up diverse visions and practices of feminist parenting, bringing together authors of different locations and generations in reflection and analysis. It’s a vivid reminder of how in interweaving the personal and political, feminist scholarship transforms our understandings of self, society and others.
—Professor Andrea Cornwall, Anthropologist and Pro-Director (Research & Enterprise), SOAS University of London
Feminist Parenting is a unique and profound anthology by heterodox feminist parents. It is a wide-ranging, ground-breaking work which creatively links parenting and feminism. I having nothing but praises for this archiving and documentation of personal and individual voices of feminist parents.
—Sabelo J Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Research Professor and Director of Scholarship in the Department of Leadership and Transformation in the Principal and Vice-Chancellor’s Office at the University of South Africa
This timely collection of personal narratives provides refreshing perspectives on the experiences of feminist mothers, feminist fathers and those of their children. Feminist Parenting: Perspectives from Africa and Beyond offers amazing new ways in theory and method. It transcends mainstream theorising about feminist parenting through a focus on African and wider Global South feminisms. The personal narratives are a powerful way of tracing non-Eurocentric forms of knowledge transmission in an open dialogue of different generations. This book is vital reading for anyone interested in the new waves of feminist politics that have arisen across the African continent and beyond.
—Heike Becker, Professor of Anthropology, University of the Western Cape, South Africa.
Author of Namibian Women’s Movement 1980 to 1992. From Anticolonial Struggle Reconstruction