Histoire des femmes et perspective de genre en Afrique, essai de synthèse

Résumé 0

To deny the role of women as historical agents, marginalizing the studies dealing with them is now impossible. For many years, if not decades, the history of women in Africa has bloomed in such a way that one cannot provide a full bibliography any more. Africa is therefore no exception. Nevertheless, including women first as objects of research and then as active subjects always happens within a particular historiography. This is also the case for the African continent. Yet writing African history did not follow the same path as for the Western World, itself differentiated by national trends. The autonomy of women’s history and the way gender is understood derive from them. At the same time, African history is not separate from a larger historiographical context, in which political, economic and narrative history tend to be replaced by social and cultural history. At the same time, subaltern and postcolonial studies, the gender perspective, globalization or intersectionality have also impacted the writing of African history. Producing its own paradigms, the history of women in Africa underwent successive changes, characterized by dominant topoi: the effort to counteract negative discourses produced by colonizers or missionaries; emphasis upon the collusion between colonial policies and local patriarchal societies; not to mention the impact of contemporary preoccupations upon the choice of research themes… This does not mean that colonization should be placed at the center of historical analysis. Rather, colonization can be used as a heuristic tool. This contribution aims at analyzing these entangled phases, while showing the complexity of the approaches. These orientations draw material from various national trends, in a vast and immensely diverse continent.