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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:The power of (third world) women: liberation and limits in 'God's bits of wood'
Author:McDonald, PatrickISNI
Year:2015
Periodical:Research in African Literatures (ISSN 0034-5210)
Volume:46
Issue:3
Pages:146-164
Language:English
Geographic term:Senegal
Subjects:feminism
gender inequality
colonialism
literature
films
About person:Sembčne Ousmane (1923-2007)ISNI
External link:http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/research_in_african_literatures/v046/46.3.mcdonald.pdf
Abstract:Senegalese author and filmmaker Sembene Ousmane is justly touted as a radical feminist attuned to the power of women in colonial Africa in his fiction and his films. Critics correctly hail his 1960 novel, 'God's Bits of Wood', as the place he embodies this radical feminism most decidedly. However, none of these analyses accounts for the very real limits to their liberation that the women in the novel face-both from colonial ideologies and traditional Oulof family structures. In this paper, reading Sembene alongside the socialist feminisms of Friedrich Engels, Maria Mies, Selma James, and Mariarosa Dalla Costa and paying particular attention to the issue of colonialism in each of these works, the author demonstrates that Sembene is a theorist not just of women's potential for liberation, but also of the very real limits they face in their struggles for liberation. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract]
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