African Women and their Networks of Support: Intervening Connections is an interdisciplinary analysis of how African women, in their different cultural, social, and political spaces, find innovative strategies to address the challenge they face and voice their often-underrepresented perspectives. These actions are often molded in either formal or informal networks of support that provide women with the necessary peer-based foundation to deal with gender discrimination, violence, and subjugation. On other occasions, women's strategies toward change are driven by specific individuals who set the transformative agenda and trajectory toward social change. Contributors label these efforts as intervening connections, representing women's intentional actions to circumvent, disrupt, question, and ultimately rearrange structures of gender discrimination. Respective chapters capture networks that are historic and current; real, virtual, and imagined; local and transnational, and managed by women on the continent as well as in the diaspora. Considering these diverse spaces in which networking happens, contributors underscore not only how African women aim at deconstructing current systemic gender inequalities, but also how they are developing futures of gender equity and equality.
Introduction: Intervening Connections: Below the Sightline Elene Cloete, Martha Ndakalako-Bannikov and Mariah C. Stember Chapter 1: Sama Jigeen: Women and Women-Led Associations in a New Era of Politics in Dakar, Senegal Emily Jenan Riley Chapter 2: "Anything that Departs from Justice to Injustice is not Part of the Shari'a:" Women's Rights Activism and Islamic Legal Reform in Zanzibar Jessica Ott Chapter 3: "Instant Interventioning": Digital Networks, Visibility, and Support against Gender-Based Violence in South Africa Elene Cloete Chapter 4: "All This Drama": Intervening Narratives and Precarious Performances in the Namibian Online Fictional Diary The Dream of a Kwanyama Girl Martha Ndakalako-Bannikov Chapter 5: Caribbean Women Writers: Forging a New Frontier in the Regional Literary Tradition LaFleur Cockburn Chapter 6: Networks of Collective Memory: Women's Narratives of Injustice in Northern Kenya Irene Awino Chapter 7: Revisiting Token Resistance and its Effect on the Perpetuation of Rape Culture Olushola Aromona Chapter 8: "The Revolution is in the Everyday": Women in the Namibian Liberation Movement Mariah C. Stember Chapter 9: "Finding Home": Displaced African Women in Rural Southwest Kansas Debra J.H. Bolton Conclusion: Future Interventions, Persistent Networks About the Contributors
