Deadline: 30 May 2012
Call for Contributions: Social Change and Women’s Writing in Nigeria, 1990 – 2010: Essays in Honour of Professor Theodora AkachI Ezeigbo
The past two decades, 1990 – 2010, have proved to be a watershed in the cultural landscape of Nigeria as far as the involvement of women is concerned. Women’s participation in the nation’s cultural life as writers, musicians, actresses in screen and on stage productions and other entertainment roles underlines the emerging range of opportunities available for self-expression among them. These opportunities, and the ways that many women continue to appropriate them, are indicators of a deep and profound change in sex and social relations that must now be characterized and documented.
In a context where a primary marker of inequality in sex relations has often been shown to be the predominance of men in entertainment production, this emerging trend has significant implications for revising or retaining received ideas about the potential or actual spaces open to women for full participation in the cultural life and economy of their communities. Given the scenario, can we now begin a fruitful discussion of sex relations on terms devoid of many past assumptions which undergird the conversations on gender and women’s condition?
If a tentative answer is in the affirmative as a wide range of social experience tends to illustrate, then the old conversation that centred on the problems of being a woman in Africa, must now give way to a new one focusing on how women have taken advantage of the exposition to confront the problem in our postcolonial experience. More importantly, the analytical procedures which often ‘Africanize’ the discourse of sex relations are no longer suitable for understanding the nuances of the various issues and how they are being confronted.
The old, continental ken of vision, frameworks and methodologies for assessing these issues must now yield space for more closely knit national or regional scrutinizations. We invite essays for a volume that would document critical reflections on these issues based on informed reading of fictions and their contexts of production by Nigerian women writers in the last two decades. So far, this has been a most phenomenal and impressive period of fiction writing by Nigerian women. Prospective contributors to the volume are urged to focus on a variety of issues, both textual and extra-textual, which are shaping the directions of writing and publishing in Nigeria with primary focus on how women and the fictional texts they often produce are redefining and enriching cultural production and the entertainment industry.
We have space for a limited number of articles which examine the subject as defined in various texts. We are particularly interested in comparative studies of the phenomenon of sex and social relations in texts of Nigerian women writers based at home and the Diaspora. However, our main interest is in essays based on ‘extra-textual’ examination of the issues, By which we mean that contributors should step out of the restrictions of thematic representations to engage a variety of crucial issues relating to women and writing in Nigeria.
One of such issues is political and polemical, and essays could be framed in response to a range of overlapping questions, including the following:
- How relevant are discussions of sex relations in contemporary analyses of literary production and consumption in Nigeria? On what terms should they be framed given the current plateau of social change in Nigeria?
- What role are gender and politics still playing in shaping fictions written by Nigerian women in the light of perceived or verified improvements in women’s condition?
- The other is empirical and relates to the current state of the Nigerian publishing industry and the way(s) that women have featured therein, either as writers or mediators of writing.
We are particularly interested in the following:
- Studies which document or account for the market share index held by women and women’s writing.
- Contributions that investigate the impact of incentives such as literary prizes and awards in the establishment of a cultural economy where women have become visible or invisible participants.
- Elucidatory perspectives that account for the literal avalanche of writing by women in the past two decades and the conclusions that can be reached about the social dynamics of sex relations based on the development.
- The third and final ‘extra-textual’ perspective of the essays we are seeking is ethnographic. In this regard, we urge contributors to address themselves to the following question and other issues related to it:
- What factors –historical, cultural, political, economic and others – account for the slew of women writers from particular regions of the country?
We expect incisive, theoretically grounded and readable discussions. Essays should not be more than 7000 words in length. Citations should accord with the MLA formulations. Send us an abstract of between 250-400 words to acquaint us with your intended subject and to enable us open communication with you. The deadline for receipt of the abstract is 30th May, 2012. Final papers are due on 30th August,2012.
Patrick Oloko, Ph.D
Department of English Department of English
University of Lagos
Email: p_oloko@yahoo.com
+2348023212000
Omolola Oladele, Ph.D
Lagos State University (LASU)
Email: theresaladele@yahoo.co.uk
Phone: +2348034125034
CONTACT INFORMATION:
For enquiries/ submissions: p_oloko@yahoo.com, theresaladele@yahoo.co.uk