African Women Under Fire

Pauline Ada Uwakweh is associate professor of literature at North Carolina A &T State University.

• ForewordAcknowledgmentsPart I: Female, Victim, Agent: African Women in War and ConflictIntroduction: Exploring African Women and the War Experience—A Critical Update, by Pauline Ada UwakwehChapter 1: At the Center, Taking Charge: Disruptive Discourse and Female Agency in Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, by Jessie SagawaChapter 2: An Attempt at Inclusion: Reading the War Theme in Black Zimbabwean Women Texts, by Tendai MangenaChapter 3: The Female Body as Locus for National Trauma in the Fiction of Yvonne Vera, by Melissa R. RootChapter 4: Fanta Nacro’s Night of Truth: the Journey to the End of the Night, by P. Julie PapaioannouChapter 5: Resilient Strategies and Reconstruction in Leonora Miano’s Literary Writing, by Paul N. TouréPart II: Trauma, Reintegration, Healing: Transcending the Aftermath of Wars and ConflictsChapter 6: Memoir versus Fiction: Narrating Trauma in Girl Soldier: A Story of Hope for Northern Uganda's Children and Thirty Girls, by Pauline Ada UwakwehChapter 7: “I Just Wanted To Forget It All. But It Was Impossible:” Umutesi and the Politics of Testimony in Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire, by Emilie DioufChapter 8: Victims’ Narratives versus Perpetrators Testimonies: Understanding Violence against Women in Armed Conflicts in Africa, by Moussa IssifouChapter 9: Testimony as Text: “Performative Vulnerability” and the Limits of Legalistic Approaches to Refugee Protection, by Nanjala NyabolaAbout the Contributors

Pauline Uwakweh’s edited volume brings out a fresh and equally significant perspective that focuses upon the much-needed African women’s literary responses to wars and armed conflicts. . . Pauline Uwakweh beautifully gives a critique of a patriarchy and especially literary patriarchy, while bringing war and gender issues under study. Her book demonstrates how women’s voices are missing in war literature and what can be done to overcome this lacuna. Women under Fire is certainly going to be an authentic source on literary discourse on war and conflict besides being a credible work on African literary criticism in the gender arena. Given its thick description the work is too provoking for future researchers not to go further and deeper into the themes touched upon. Throughout the chapters there been an intellectual engagement with various socio-literary themes bringing out various war realities especially the gendered relations and power play between them. This work can indeed be called Pauline Uwakweh’s and her fellow coauthors’ labor of love.