Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso

This chapter caps the Handbook part on “Research and Knowledge Production on Women in Africa.” In surveying the epistemological, methodological, and pedagogic issues addressed in this part, certain gaps, silences, distortions, and misconceptions were flagged by the authors in this part. One way to contribute to the redress of these trends observable in the research, study and teaching of African women at institutions and classrooms across the globe is to provide templates for an emancipation and decolonization of the curriculum and corpus. This is the primary objective of this chapter.

Conflict, war, and human rights abuses remain the most potent cause of forced human displacement globally and on the African continent. Up to 57% of all refugees on the African continent are women, but in spite of this, women often constitute an afterthought in international law and states policy designs or are only added and stirred in the prevalent liberal humanitarian practice. Eschewing essentialist discourses, this chapter critiques these trends from feminist intersectionality and gendered continuum of violence perspectives. It analyzes how African refugee and displaced women’s identities and positions within state and international legal, policy and humanitarian structure produce a gendered continuum of displacement experiences from the pre-war to the conflict and postconflict periods. It further posits pathways for furthering the study of women’s displacement within African women’s studies.

A gendered reading of transitional justice raises critical questions considering the nature of peace expected to be achieved in post-conflict settings. This chapter assesses the themes that shape these conversations, structured around the recognition of gender-specific harms against women, gender-sensitive reparation policies, understanding gender structural disparities that expose women to certain harms, and engaging women in the institutions and processes of planning and implementing transitional justice mechanisms and processes. These gendered justice gaps discursively shape transitional justice scholarship in Africa and Latin America, as a critical pointer to the state of the field. It underscores the important benefits in the coalescence of gender studies in transitional justice protocol, particularly in the development of the relevant body of scholarship, the ability to learn through transitional justice mechanisms and processes, and the increasing scholarly demand for prioritizing these gender-specific themes in policy formulation. The chapter provides us with new information inspiring cautious optimism about mainstreaming gender concerns and priorities in post-conflict peacebuilding policy and the implementation of conflict transformative programs in these transitional societies.

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.

The Palgrave Handbook of African Women’s Studies is a distinctive reference book bringing together knowledge, scholarship, analysis, and debates on African women’s themes and issues everywhere. It unearths, critiques, reviews, analyzes, theorizes, synthesizes, and evaluates African women’s historical, social, political, economic, local and global lives, and experiences with a view to decolonizing the corpus. The chapters in this volume question the gendered roles and positions of African women and the structures, institutions, and processes of policy, politics, and knowledge production that continually construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct African women and the study of them. Thus, this Handbook enlarges the scope of the field, challenges its orthodoxies, and engenders new subjects, theories, and approaches. In this way, the Palgrave Handbook of African Women’s Studies not only curates but also charts a path for the study of African women in all their variegated contexts and complexities from competing standpoints, centering women in the African world and worldview historically and contemporarily, and from multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary lenses. Importantly too, this Handbook creates space and opportunities for giving voice to African women everywhere to tell their stories and share their experiences, working with African women everywhere, thus representing a space for amplifying African women’s voices. This introductory chapter elucidates the objectives of the Handbook; engages the contentions and contestations in African women’s studies that propelled its unique decolonial approach; reviews the currents in the field over time; reveals its asymmetries and coloniality; and provides a detailed narrative map for navigating the parts and chapters in the Handbook.

Although all societies have emerged through various complex processes of knowledge acquisition, dissemination and utilization, the unequal power equilibrium in the global system has produced a situation in which the powerful dominates the less powerful. Scholars have argued that knowledge production in the post-Enlightenment era reflects the interests, values and epistemologies of the dominant powers, undoubtedly represented by the Euro-America hegemonic world. This epistemic hegemony was achieved at the expense of the epistemic flourishing of non-Western knowledge systems. This chapter contributes to the debate on the politics of knowledge production. It locates African knowledge systems within the global hierarchical structure of knowledge production and argues that contrary to the deliberate silencing that has characterized knowledges from Africa, the continent boasts of indigenous approaches to managing socio-economic and political aspects of lives. The chapter also synthesizes the remaining chapters in the book.