“Marrying Out” for Love: Women’s Narratives of Polygyny and Alternative Marriage Choices in Contemporary Senegal

Posted in Africa, Anthropology, Articles, Media Archive, Women on 2016-04-25 14:50Z by Steven

“Marrying Out” for Love: Women’s Narratives of Polygyny and Alternative Marriage Choices in Contemporary Senegal

African Studies Review
Volume 59, Number 1, April 2016
pages 155-174

Hélène Neveu Kringelbach, Lecturer in African Studies
University College London

This article examines the ways in which childhood and youth experiences of living in polygynous households shape the aspirations of middle-class Muslim Senegalese women to companionate marriage. Increasingly, such aspirations are fulfilled through marriage with European men. In contrast to an enduring popular discourse according to which women live happily with polygyny throughout the Senegambian region, this article shows how some middle-class women’s choice to “marry out” is explicitly linked to family narratives and personal experiences of suffering. In a context in which many of these women face strong familial opposition to marriage with non-Muslim European men, this article suggests that the women’s narratives provide moral legitimacy to their “alternative” choices.

Cet article examine comment et de quelles manières les expériences des enfants et des jeunes qui vivent dans des ménages polygames, façonnent les aspirations des femmes sénégalaises musulmanes de la classe moyenne au mariage de compagnonnage. De plus en plus, de telles aspirations sont satisfaites par le mariage avec des hommes européens. Contrairement à un discours populaire qui perdure selon lequel les femmes vivent heureuses dans la polygynie dans toute la région de Sénégambie, cet article montre comment le choix de certaines femmes de la classe moyenne à «se marier en dehors» est explicitement lié à des récits de famille et des expériences de souffrances personnelles. Cet article suggère que les récits des femmes assurent la légitimité morale à leurs choix “alternatifs” dans un contexte où beaucoup d’entre elles font face à une forte opposition familiale au mariage avec des hommes européens non-musulmans.

Read or purchase the article here.

Tags: , , , ,

Anomaly dir. by Jessica Chen Drammeh (review)

Posted in Articles, Autobiography, Book/Video Reviews, Media Archive, United States on 2014-12-17 18:25Z by Steven

Anomaly dir. by Jessica Chen Drammeh (review)

African Studies Review
Volume 57, Number 3, December 2014
pages 274-275

Manouchka Kelly Labouba, USC Provost’s PhD Fellow
Critical Studies School of Cinematic Arts
University of Southern California

Anomaly is a personal documentary featuring mixed-raced people who discuss the complexities and challenges of defining their identity across the different races and cultures they belong to. They talk about the limitations and prejudices of the mainstream approach to race, which makes individuals like them feel like misfits. The director, Jessica Chen Drammeh, is a biracial Asian-Caucasian woman. She introduces herself as “unidentified,” and calls herself an “anomaly,” because she is “difficult to classify,” as she does not fit into any of the six ethnic and racial categories officially recognized in the U.S. Hence, Drammeh and her participants explain how they have learned to deal with people’s preconceptions, reticence, and narrow-mindedness about their racial mixture. They explain how being of mixed-raced heritage ultimately renders them both invisible and hypervisible. They are invisible because their multiracial background tends to be unacknowledged, as they feel socially compelled to identify with one race only. Yet they are also hypervisible because their distinctness is so apparent. Eventually all of Drammeh’s subjects share how they have come to terms with their multiracial identity and developed a sense of pride about their genetic makeup, which they consider makes them culturally rich.

Although the documentary does not specifically focus on multiracial Americans of African descent, the film does feature one biracial Congolese-American, a young man named Pete [Shungu]. He is a saxophonist who plays jazzy melodies with a big uncombed Afro hairstyle. His parents separated when he was ten, and he grew up in New Jersey with his Caucasian mother. She appears in the film and talks about how she would dress up in a Congolese outfit, put a baby doll on her back, and come to Pete’s class to talk about the Congo and its customs. Pete was proud of her and loved that none of his friends had a problem with his white mother dressing in African clothes. His mother explains how she felt that it was important for her to understand the culture of Pete’s father, as well as for Pete and his brother to understand their own culture. In a poem titled “Third-Eye Identity,” Pete describes how being multiracial has helped him become more open-minded. He explains how “his roots extend far beyond the places he lived in,” making him a “complex individual, not just a category.” Yet because of the way race is perceived in society, denying his blackness and identifying only as multiracial would be unrealistic. Only in his senior year in college, having enrolled in a course on the subject of mixed-race heritage, is he finally comfortable identifying himself as multiracial.

In the 2010 U.S. Census more than 9 million Americans identified themselves as multiracial, making them one of the fastest-growing demographic groups in the country. Thus Drammeh’s documentary is a valuable contribution in what should be a national effort to perceive and acknowledge this segment of the population, as well as understand what these individuals experience as minorities. Many movies have thematized the moral barriers and societal challenges faced by interracial couples in America, such as Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (dir. Stanley Kramer, 1967), Jungle Fever (dir. Spike Lee, 1991), Mississippi Masala (dir. Mira Nair, 1991), and the documentary The Loving Story (dir. Nancy Buirski, 2011), about Richard and Mildred Loving, whose Supreme Court ruling in 1967 put an end to antimiscegenation laws. However, few films have focused on how the offspring of such relationships are integrated in U.S. society. Though Drammeh’s documentary does not try to fill that void on its own, it does give an insight into what many have called “the changing face” of America.

However, Drammeh’s work unfortunately does not tackle its subject matter in the most effective manner. The film resembles more a student project on this assigned theme, rather than a documentary targeted at a broad audience. As a filmmaker, she chooses to intertwine extensive personal interviews with poems and songs by the participants, on the one hand, and with a few contributions by scholars, on the other. By doing so, she makes her movie slightly too personal and informal, which eventually diminishes…

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 by Dagmar Schultz (review)

Posted in Articles, Biography, Book/Video Reviews, Europe, Gay & Lesbian, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Women on 2014-05-05 17:30Z by Steven

Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 by Dagmar Schultz (review)

African Studies Review
Volume 57, Number 1, April 2014
pages 237-238
DOI: 10.1353/arw.2014.0038

Patricia-Pia Célérier, Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies
Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 is a 79-minute documentary in English and German, directed and produced by Dagmar Schultz. An academic and close friend of Lorde’s, Schultz also co-edited (with May Opitz and Katharina Oguntoye) the book Farbe Bekennen: Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte (1986; translated as Showing our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out, University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), which marked the beginning of the “Afro-German movement.” Schultz contributed her own archival video and audio recordings and footage to the documentary, adding testimonies from Lorde’s colleagues, students, and friends. Released in 2012, twenty years after Lorde’s death, Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 is an homage to the African American writer’s tremendous contributions as well as a useful complement to two other documentaries: A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde (1995) by Ada Gray Griffin and Michelle Parkerson, and The Edge of Each Other’s Battles: The Vision of Audre Lorde (2002) by Jennifer Abod. Schultz’s film has attracted significant attention and received the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Barcelona Gay and Lesbian Film Festival.

Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 focuses on an understudied period in the life of the prolific author and activist, the time when she traveled between the U.S. and Germany to lecture and visit friends. It features her relationship to the black diaspora and her mentoring role in the development of the antiracist struggle and the Afro-German movement before and after the German reunification. In true feminist fashion, the documentary links the personal and the political, representing Lorde’s ongoing fight against cancer, her inspiring presence at feminist consciousness-raising meetings, her carefree dancing at multiracial lesbian parties, and her partnership with the poet Gloria I. Joseph.

The film highlights Lorde’s part in building bridges among women of color, feminist, and LGBT social justice movements, in “hyphenating” black Germans. In doing so, it contextualizes the history of major cultural shifts in the late ’80s/early ’90s in Germany. It speaks to audiences both familiar and unfamiliar with Lorde’s work by articulating themes that are at the core of the writer’s production: for instance, the meaning of intimacy and sharing, and the radical role a creative understanding of difference plays in personal and intellectual growth.

Although valuable as a testimonial and politically committed film, Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 unfortunately lacks a strong coherent form, its point of view neither sufficiently clear nor technically grounded. Because the filmmaker does not provide a theoretical or narrative perspective (apart from documenting Lorde’s life), the archival images and interviews overtake the film, which in turn seems dated, as if it had been produced twenty years ago. The viewer is not pulled into the story early enough, and the editing does not compensate imaginatively for the somewhat haphazard manner with which the documentary proceeds.

Should we consider, nevertheless, that the historical and political value of such a film overrides issues of filmic quality and narrative coherence, especially because it was made on a tight budget and is a labor of love? A documentary cannot be considered as merely reproducing cultural (feminist, Afro-German, LGBT) meaning, but also as creating (new) meaning. Unfortunately, Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 does not sufficiently demonstrate an awareness of the different ways of understanding and theorizing women’s lives that are available today. As a recording of social life and a travelogue, it does accomplish the two goals of the documentary genre: it informs and educates. Like feminist films of the 1970s, it celebrates the clamor of women’s voices and the rising up of women of color and gay women. It sheds light on the diversity of women’s lifestyles and choices and the issues in gay politics. But how do these images of Lorde inform our current understanding of feminism and feminist practices? What spaces does Lorde’s legacy occupy today? These questions are not answered by the film. In addition, because it does not suggest an awareness of the discursive and technical changes that have advanced the…

Tags: , , , ,