Any talk of womanhood, especially in grammatically gendered (neo)European languages, puts us into a colosseum of “Western” notions of gender and fe/male, where we lose because the fight is on their terrain, using their terms as faux weapons. Oyèrónké Oyèwùmí has successfully argued the categories of “gender” and “woman” are not cross-culturally inherent in social relations, and remarking how these social construct entering the English language in the late 19th and early 20th century have been used uncritically.[1] In the context of Oyèwùmí’s Yorùbá culture, the category of “woman,” as biologically determined, did not exist until British colonial rule. The Yorùbá language, like the Akan language of Ghana which I speak, are gender-neutral. They do not grammatically declare gender. Cultural context does.
cultural identity
Blackness, Pan-Africanism, and Chadwick Boseman
EssaysCommentI moved from Brooklyn to the District of Columbia (DC) in June 2000 for graduate studies at Howard University. Chadwick Boseman graduated from Howard a month before I arrived, and we would never meet. But I encountered him through his movies, which is to say the way he worked the silver screen to place notions of blackness and pan-Africanism, or pan-African blackness, for us to seriously engage their implications: is blackness and pan-Africanism relevant in the age of Chadwick Boseman? By “age,” I mean the chronological life of Boseman and the afterlife of he and the characters he reimagined for global Africa. Chadwick’s life work, echoing W. E. B. Du Bois, seized upon the idea that “all art is propaganda”—a tool Du Bois considered part of the arsenal for “racial uplift” across the pan-African world.