Abstract
This concluding chapter of the Palgrave Handbook of African Women’s Studies provides a critical overview of the continuing challenges in African women’s lives and African women’s studies, spotlighting the representational issues of content, scope, and ownership in order to chart a decolonial path for an emancipatory future for African women’s studies. The introductory chapter elaborated the state of the field at the point at which the Handbook was conceived, the objectives of the text, and spotlighted the unique contributions that chapters in the Handbook make in moving the discussion forward by deconstructing extant perspectives and proposing new and sophisticated analysis of the issues. Nonetheless, if there is any consensus throughout the text, it is that while there has been some progress on many issues affecting women’s lives, as well as in scholars’ articulation and understanding of these, there yet remains much to be done to transform retrogressive epistemological impulses that affect how African women’s lives are studied and written. In this concluding chapter, we focus on a selection of these, by no means exhaustive, and articulate suggested paths towards a future of the field that does not replicate the problems of the past.
