Search Results (4)

Neither women’s studies nor lesbian and gay studies offers an adequate theoretical or political base for disruptive scholarship. Reading and interpreting Southern African writers, especially Sindiwe Magona and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, promotes women’s studies as an academic and political approach to both gender and the erotic. Drawing on genealogies of rupture and intergenerational studies, we argue that the feminist is a positionality that must be widely available to challenge heterosexual perspectives and become a catalyst for audiences to engage in nuanced analyses of discourses on places and genres—narrative in particular—where memories are rearticulated and elaborated. This article explores how the narratives of Magona, Ngugi, and Soyinka inform and complicate the erasure, erosion, and amnesia that accompany contemporary imaginaries of what is re/membered. We challenge the tendency to evaluate African feminisms as only either oppressive or empowering and read the selected texts and their prototypical characters as dynamic embodiments that inform gendered spaces across both the attachments that people hold to particular gender identities and styles and recognising the punitive realities of dominant gender expectations. The article takes a positionality on the often troubled relationship between feminism and femininity, a critical but generous reading that highlights the potential for an affirmative orientation towards identity politics. This study utilises the theoretical lenses of border thinking and decolonial and African feminisms to interrogate matrifocal borderlands and the sociohistorical and cultural dis/continuities of being and becoming. We explore notions of the entanglement of motherhood, daughterhood, wifehood, and sisterhood as morphing identities. These are identities at the margins of political, sociocultural, and gender normativities in African literature. Magona’s “threshold people”, like Ngugi’s perfect nine, destabilise, disrupt, and refuse to be subordinated as they codify living differently in the in-between worlds. Magona, for instance, laminates the challenging discourse of contestation to map difficult, dangerous, and marginal spaces where women live at the borders of sociocultural, religious, ethnic, and gendered norms. These are spaces suffused with affective possibilities—defensiveness, shame, anxiety, anger, curiosity—and the women have to develop relational solidarities in negotiating hyper-visibilities or (in)visibilities within the 21st-century global south. Full article

Mosque architecture often exhibits distinct identities, elements, and forms associated with geographical locations or dynastic patronage in the Islamic world. However, there has been a significant paradigm shift in mosque architecture over the past century, with external factors influencing the construction and sustainability of contemporary mosques. This study examines the evolution of mosque architecture in Nigeria, concentrating on the Ilorin Central Mosque as a pivotal case study connecting the northern and southern regions. The study employs a qualitative research methodology, utilizing descriptive approach, historical research, architectural analysis, and field observations to examine the architectural language, urban context, and socio-historical factors shaping the mosque’s development. Although geographical settings have always influenced traditional religious designs in Nigeria, the findings reveal a transformation from simple mud structures to grand modern edifices. The Ilorin Central Mosque exemplifies this shift, with its Ottoman-inspired domes and minarets contrasting with the traditional vernacular mosques of the 19th century. The study highlights the challenges of globalization, sustainability, foreign architectural influences, and the tension between local identity and contemporary trends in mosque architecture. The study concludes by arguing that future mosques must reintegrate regionalism, local materials, and climate-responsive principles into contemporary aesthetics while considering the quintessential principles of the Prophet’s Mosque and the religious and social significance of mosques within the urban fabric. The Ilorin Central Mosque exemplifies a microcosm of the transformations in Nigerian mosque architecture, highlighting the necessity of a balanced approach that embraces both cultural heritage and contemporary needs. Full article

For more than 10 years, we have been observing the Fayda Tijaniyya and its ramifications around the world. Starting in 2006 we have been conducting observations in Nigeria, Niger, Senegal and Mauritania. Between 2015 and 2017, we closely followed some developments of the Fayda in the French capital and in other European cities. In parallel to these field investigations, we have been interested in the new religious arrangements that are gradually emerging in the United Kingdom. More recently, in 2020, we benefited from a stay in the USA which allowed us to widen our observation framework. From there, we were able to collect empirical material consisting of several dozen interviews, direct observation notes, private and public documents (reports, administrative documents, correspondences, letters of recommendation, press articles, travel chronicles and private videos, among others). In the Fayda Ibrahimiyya, the global culture suggests an update of the mode of inheritance, but in addition it makes emerge a new framework of activity essentially composed of a device of formation with global character, of a hybrid diplomatic-religious space, finally of a humanitarian action which appears as a missionary presenza. We first show that the conjunction of these three registers of action has as a condition, a process of articulation and appropriation through which the actors of the Fayda manage to convince of the link of identity that prevails between their own history and that of the founder. The conclusion of the article is devoted to a critical discussion in which we postulate that the imagination of a homogeneous global community comes up against a form of local resistance that is a counterpoint and probably an anti-globalizing replica. The historical socio-anthropology of comprehensive inspiration that we favour allows us to finely approach the interdependencies between these three registers and the narrative elaborated locally by the supporters of this community. The paradigm of mobility in which we place the Fayda, allows us to grasp the scope of the globalization of practices and uses, as well as the tension that operates between a dynamic of continuity and a dynamic of rupture that crosses for some decades this religious community. Full article

In the wake of numerous terror attacks around the globe, academic and popular discourse on radicalization has witnessed exponential growth in publications that, sadly, have not resulted in a coherent or consensus definition of the concept, nor have they determined its causality and effects. In this article, we use the term three-pronged process of radicalization by narrative to denote an ongoing process of meaning-making, adaptation, and coping, and argue this process to be inherently linked with the social, cultural, and ideological construction and reconstruction of the identity arch-story of individual lives. We suggest that, in some cases, the ceaseless process of social interaction of identity narratives eventuates in what we define as the Shapeshifting Self, by coherently fusing stories of personal loss, rupture, or trauma together with the counterparts of movements and national stories of sociopolitical engagement. At the endpoint of the process, violent engagement is perceived by the self as legitimate and even necessary for the psychological well-being of the perpetrator. By applying this approach to the Jewish-Israeli context, we aim to illustrate the socioculturally situated contingencies associated with the process of radicalization by narrative. Full article