The newest issue of Feminist Formations, a leading journal for innovative work in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, centers Writing African Feminist Subjectivities.

This special issue seeks to deepen our understanding of African feminist subjectivities, a subject that challenges, rewrites, and radically reconfigures our approach to history, identity, and activism. Editors Maha Marouan, Alicia C. Decker, and Zinhle ka’Nobuhlaluse frame this issue by proposing a new conception of subjectivity grounded in the value of the communal on to counter the Eurocentric individualistic model. In the introduction, they write

To that end, we contend that this issue situates African feminist subjectivities as a radical site of contestation of our humanity. It is a critique of the violence of global capitalism that thrives on unrelatedness by normalizing the disposability of individuals, communities, cultures, and ecosystems while also producing and perpetuating a discursive violence intent on hijacking knowledge production that promotes non-hierarchical relational living.

This issue on “Writing African Feminist Subjectivities” is the second project by the African Feminist Initiative to “reimagine and expand the normative feminist canon.” This issue is organized over three sections and consists of sixteen contributors whose works include ten essays, four poems, two book reviews, and a cover art collage.

The first section opens with Patricia McFadden’s “Subjectivity Is the Critical Foundational Expression of Feminist Contemporarity” which argues that subjectivity is foundational to feminist thought—an idea that has always been central to her activism as an African eco-feminist. Several essays including Minna Salami’s “African Feminist Individuation” and Maha Marouan’s “Moroccan Feminist Subjectivities and the Ethics of Relationality” explore various forms of subjectivity emerging from African women’s thought in archival and personal sources. The section closes with an intergenerational exchange between two South African feminists, Mamphela Ramphele and ka’Nobuhlaluse.

The second section of this issue features poetry by Gabeba Baderoon and Shailja Patel, both of which explore themes of home, belonging, and the complexities of memory and resistance. This issue also includes reviews of Niara Sudarkasa’s Where Women Work: A Study of Yoruba Women in the Marketplace and in the Home (1973) and Amanda Lock Swarr’s Envisioning African Intersex: Challenging Colonial and Racist Legacies in South African Medicine (2023). Ethel-Ruth Tawe contributed the cover art for this issue titled “A Gathering Place.”

Many contributors articulate the importance of charting and claiming feminist genealogies, not only to preserve African feminist legacies but to inspire new generations of radical thinkers and activists. The editors position this issue as “a register of African feminist subjectivities that offer liberatory possibilities through the act of writing, invariably interpreted by the contributors to this issue as a practice of truth-telling, as an active act of remembrance, and as a site of transgression, resistance, and freedom.”

Read some recent articles from Feminist Formations open access here.