Material Culture and Literature in Sub-Saharan Africa – Women’s Voices more

Ana Maria Martinho Gale Universidade Nova de Lisboa Centro de História da Cultura WISPS XII Conference London, 10-11 November 2011 ABSTRACT :1 The collective perception of material heritage has changed dramatically in SubSaharan countries in recent years. Some see this as a direct result of political and social empowerment, others as a consequence of the continuous growth of African cities and of their peripheries. We may choose to read such change under a political, a cultural, or an ethnographic perspective; in either case the localization of cultural practices and of their objects calls for the acknowledgment of movable signs in current African archives. The de-centered experiences of archeological venues are no longer out of reach for most subjects, since they operate from multiple, informed reading contexts. "Being and having" are transforming the material and immaterial settings of cultural identification and establishing unprecedented writing and reading practices. The growth of different forms of "built-in obsolescence", as a means to convey shortlived experiences, has changed the nature of cultural objects and their collective reception. ABSTRACT :2 The engineering of new products and their writing, notably by women, have created revised forms of producing and of designing such objects. Literary archives pertain to this group of radical, hi-tech, "protean matter". As colonial legacies have been replaced or assimilated by postcolonial discourse, modern African narratives keep emerging as often contested revisions of the so-called traditional oral stories and histories. They are cultural testimonies of national travelers, and epitomize transitions experienced through "nomadism". Authorship and strategies of appropriation of such macro-narratives carry potential conflicts and power struggle as far as semiotic distribution is concerned. A combined perspective of Anthropology and Literature can illuminate some aspects of the discontinuities in cultural identification between women intellectuals and their ³tribes´. ABSTRACT :3 Many African women writers are in the center of a debate that brought to the public eye a new way of looking at power and culture. One of my main interlocutors in this paper will be the Mozambican writer Paulina Chiziane. She belongs to a generation of intellectuals responsible for creating a ³violent´ reading of cultures in contact, mediation, and ³new regionalisms´. These perspectives can apply to the realities of Angola, Moçambique, South Africa or Botswana, due to the many tensions generated in the peripheral urban communities in these countries. The cyclical growth of the slums not only circumscribes the urban centers, but it also forces them to deal with the disorder of fragmentary cultures in transit and with potential political disruption. The Nation State as idealized in the emergent discourses on sovereignty is currently being re-written from the outskirts of a new metropolis. The new texts that empower these changing communities support their sovereign status. Urban deregulation originates semiotic deregulation and a new material culture. Alternatively, more radically put, a new social order, which challenges the notions of "postcoloniality", of "subaltern condition" and, naturally, of imperialism as we know it. The collective perception of material heritage has changed dramatically in SubSaharan countries in recent years The localization of cultural practices and of their objects calls for the acknowledgment of movable signs in current African archives Fragmentary cultures in transit Because of their historical predicaments, postcolonies tend not to be organized under a single, vertically integrated sovereignty sustained by a highly centralized state. Rather, they consist in a horizontally woven tapestry of partial sovereignties: sovereignties over terrains and their inhabitants, over aggregates of people conjoined in faith or culture, over transactional spheres, over networks of relations, regimes of property, domains of practice, and, quite often, over various combinations of these things; sovereignties longer or shorter lived, protected to a greater or lesser degree by the capacity to exercise compulsion, always incomplete. Comaroff (2006: 35). Technologies of the self are what Michel Foucault calls the methods and techniques ("tools") through which human beings constitute themselves. Planned obsolescence or built-in obsolescence Warnier: watch out for the trap of the effect Magritte whereby the painting of a pipe is confused with the pipe as material object Matiere a Penser, approach to material culture: objects, subjects and the materiality of the self in the perspective of 3 anthropologists Pierre Warnier (2009), Marie Pierre Julien, & Celine Rosselin (2005; 2009) Praxeology - the study of the sensory motor dimension in the interaction between people and things, as a way of avoiding mistaking materiality for sign-value Persons / agents as subjects constituted by objects and other subjects In the midst of the momentous shift to an inclusive democracy, South Africa¶s visual and material culture represented the past whilst contributing to the process of social transformation. Considering attempts to invent and recover historical icons and narratives, Annie E. Coombes examines how strategies for embodying different models of historical knowledge and experience are negotiated in public culture. History After Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in Democratic South Africa (2003) Singing,writing and filmmaking can be regarded as one of the ways of controlling cultural space and realigning the relations between dominant and subordinate. Both the female artist¶ s way of life as well as the nature of their work are important. Reclamation of a cultural space. In the post-independence era patriarchal attitudes flourished again and women were pushed back into traditional roles. In particular the artists. Kerstin Bolzr, Women as Artists in Contemporary Zimbabwe, 2007 Writer not strictly a creator, but rather a provider and facilitator of new relations between subject and new objects. Speaking about things and about the absence of fear of the self embodied in things or in their manifestations. Challenging literature as we know it. Unity Dow successfully challenged the legitimacy of the Citizenship Act which denied Botswana citizenship to her children on the basis that her husband is a foreigner, even though she herself is a citizen of Botswana but she did not stand in court merely for herself, or only for the women of Botswana who are married to foreigners. She also stood in court to represent all the women of Botswana who are treated as second class citizens under the various discriminatory laws. For the women of Africa Unity's victory is our victor. Such flagrant contempt for the rule of law reveals the arrogance of patriarchal power. There are close parallels in Zambia. In 1992 I myself got a High Court ruling that hotels' discrimination against unaccompanied women contradicts basic rights given in the Zambian Constitution; but this discrimination by hotels still continues. In 1990 Edith Nawakwi got a High Court Ruling that it is unconstitutional for the government to require written permission from the father of her children before putting the children's names on her passport. Four years later the Zambian government maintains the same discriminatory requirement. Material Culture and Literature in SubSaharan Africa ± Women¶s Voices Sara Hlupekile Longwe, Lusaka, 9 January 1995 Symptom by symptom, Mandla¶s body was shutting down. Usually athleticlooking, the Botswanan court worker, in his 30s, had begun to shed pounds. His lips became blistered. He developed chills and frequent bouts of diarrhea. For a while, he blamed the temperature in his office. His diet. Too much beer. But after weeks of goading from concerned coworkers, Mandla eventually worked up the courage to do what he knew he must: He got tested. When he discovered he was HIV positive, his jubilant response shocked people close to him. Just knowing what plagued him was liberating, and knowing that he¶d start drug therapy gave him hope. Material Culture and Literature in SubSaharan Africa ± Women¶s Voices ³In the early days, absolutely everyone knew close friends who died, and families who died tending to them,´ Max Essex says. ³Now, everybody knows somebody who was successfully treated and didn¶t die.´ Unity Dow and Max Essex. Saturday is for Funerals (2010) Weaving together personal anecdotes and medical history, the authors reveal how a combination of proactive government intervention, education, research, and foreign aid have achieved the near impossible. Danielle Friedman http://blogs.thedailybeast.com/interactive/women-in-the-world/150-women-who- Material Culture and Literature in SubSaharan Africa ± Women¶s Voices Paulina Chiziane prefers to consider herself a storyteller Niketche, dance, monogamy, polygamy, North, South, culture, institutions, self Material Culture and Literature in SubSaharan Africa ± Women¶s Voices O Alegre Canto da Perdiz, colonial policies, skin, motherhood, Zambézia, myths Material Culture and Literature in SubSaharan Africa ± Women¶s Voices Paulina lives and works in Zambézia. Currently working with various organizations in different provinces of Mozambique and abroad. Nominated in 2010 Ambassador of the African Union for Peace, by influential personalities in Africa in various fields.