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Full-Text Articles in African American Studies
Can You Really See Through A Squint? Theoretical Underpinnings In The 'Our Sister Killjoy', Cheryl Sterling
Can You Really See Through A Squint? Theoretical Underpinnings In The 'Our Sister Killjoy', Cheryl Sterling
Cheryl Sterling
Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy is read as an inversion of the colonial travel narrative, addressing the continued asymmetrical power relations between Europe and Africa. The paper posits Sissie, its focal character, as a site of theoretical transformations, engaging with issues of racial subjectivity, sexuality and political positionality in relation to the neo-colonial African state. It further argues that Aidoo situates a performative self in the text through an interrogatory narrative voice that succeeds in both deforming the novelistic pattern and participating in the critique of Western subjectivity and hegemonic feminist positioning, while inserting a resistant feminist ideology into …
Women-Space, Power And The Sacred In Afro-Brazilian Culture, Cheryl Sterling
Women-Space, Power And The Sacred In Afro-Brazilian Culture, Cheryl Sterling
Cheryl Sterling
This article places Afro-Brazilian women in the midst of the discourse of globalization, in light of its impact on marginalizing women of color, economically, politically, and culturally. It extends the concept of globalizing discourses to the history of enslavement and the racialist policies in Brazilian society, as seen in its policy of embranquecimento and the myth of Brazil as a racial democracy. The article then analyzes the historic and present day role of Afro-Brazilian women in the religious tradition of Candomblé, focusing on one public festival in particular, the festa for the Yoruba-based orixá, Obaluaye, in Salvador da Bahia. It …