Gender and war: Narrating the personal and political

Panellists reflect on the ways in which feminist and queer perspectives on war disobey the rules of masculinised war narratives and can decentre, dismantle and decolonise existing ways of researching and writing about conflicts. 

Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War (Daraja Press, 2024) brings together 10 years of writing on Warscapes magazine through the lens of gender and sexuality, and thus advances a new paradigm of war writing by focusing on gender. Including reportage, fiction, memoir, poetry, and conversations from over 60 writers, primarily from the Global South, these feminist and queer perspectives on war disobey the rules of masculinised war narratives. 

Panellists Bhakti Shringarpure, Robtel Neajai Pailey, Carli Coetzee and Althea Maria-Rivas reflect on the ways in which such projects can decentre, dismantle and decolonise existing ways of researching and writing about conflicts, especially as it pertains to knowledge production about the African continent. They will also engage with questions about the genres of writing war, the politicising of personal and collective memory, and the practice of collaborative and creative scholarship.

About the speakers

Bhakti Shringarpure is an Associate Professor of English and Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut and Research Fellow at the African Literature Department of Wits University. She co-founded Warscapes magazine in 2011 and it has since transitioned into the Radical Books Collective. She is the author of Cold War Assemblages: Decolonisation to Digital (2019) and editor of Literary Sudans: An Anthology of Literature from Sudan and South Sudan (2017), Imagine Africa (2017), Mediterranean: Migrant Crossings (2018) and co-translator of Kaveena, a novel by Boubabcar Boris Diop. She is the editor of the ongoing book series "Decolonise That!" for OR Books (New York) with five volumes published and more forthcoming.

Robtel Neajai Pailey is a Liberian academic, activist and author of the award-winning monograph Development, (Dual) Citizenship and Its Discontents in Africa: The Political Economy of Belonging to Liberia (Cambridge University Press) as well as the anti-corruption children’s books Gbagba and Jaadeh! (One Moore Book). Her creative non-fiction essay 'This Is Our Country', first published online by Warscapes Magazine, is included in the anthology Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War (Daraja Press). 

Althea-Maria Rivas is a Senior Lecturer in Global Development, Conflict and Peace at SOAS, University of London. Her research focuses on the politics of development, conflict, humanitarian intervention and peace, specifically the racialised and gendered nature of aid, post-conflict reconstruction and transitional justice. She is the author of Security, Conflict and Violence in Afghanistan: Everyday Stories of Intervention (2020). 

Althea is also the Director of the Ebony Initiative, a unique programme that fosters community among black scholars. Before beginning her academic career, Althea worked for +12 years in diplomacy, gender equality and humanitarian assistance with various governments, local and international organisations in North America, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Middle East.

Chair: Carli Coetzee is the current President of the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom (ASAUK) and the Chair of the Lagos Studies Association Publications Committee.  She is the editor of the Journal of African Cultural Studies and her book Written Under the Skin: Blood and Intergenerational Memory in South Africa, which was published in 2019, won the African Literature Association Best Scholarly Book Award. 

Her scholarly practice and her work as journal editor are part of an activist project of changing publishing patterns that favour scholars at well-resourced institutions. She is a frequent collaborator on writing and mentoring workshops run by the Lagos Studies Association, African Studies Association of Africa and Mashariki Conference series. She is a Research Associate at the African Studies Centre at the University of Oxford and a Research Fellow at the African Literature Department of Wits University.

Image by Migue Bruna via Unsplash