Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Brandeis University/Women and War (Spring 2024)

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This course examines how African women writers and filmmakers, representing vastly different historical and cultural experiences, bear witness to war. It interrogates how women who are survivors of war, genocide, and dictatorship use testimony to mediate acts of resistance that track the existence of violence and trauma within multiple and intersecting sites of oppression. The course will feature oral histories by women from the Gambia as well as memoirs, novels, poems, and testimonies from Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Uganda, Sudan, and South Africa. Authors include, Aminata Forna, Lemah Gbowee, Fanta Regina Nacro, Veronique Tadjo, Marie Beatrice Umutesi, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Leila Aboulela, Njabulo Ndebele, and Chimamanda Adichie. Students will examine how these writers resist political and sociocultural silencing systems that reduce traumatic experience to collective amnesia, silence, denial, and terror. Students will be introduced to the historical circumstances that shaped the work of each writer, and we will pose questions about the impact of African women’s trauma narratives on conflict transformation in various African societies.