Gendered Encounters
Subtitle: Challenging Cultural Boundaries and Social Hierarchies in Africa
Publisher: Routledge
Published: December 10, 1996
Language: eng
Number of pages: 320
ISBN-13: 9780415916431
First sentence: In the last twenty years, scholars interested in the social history of precolonial Africa have generated an impressive body of studies on gender relations in various parts of the continent.
Description: Gendered Encounters is an important contribution to contemporary debates on globalization, culture, and gender in Africa. Noted scholars from anthropology, history, comparative literature, and political science demonstrate that gender has to be an integral part of any attempt to understand local/global intersections.

Through analyses of specific social and cultural phenomena, the contributors show how translocal and transnational cultural currents are mediated by gender, how they reshape gender constructions and relations, and how they both manifest and impinge on relations of power.

Gendered Encounters makes it clear that change has been as significant as continuity in the making of culture, and that cultural creativity in Africa both antedates and continues alongside late twentieth-century technological developments. This volume will appeal to scholars and students of Africa as well as to specialists in anthropology, gender studies, history, and cultural studies.