Presence, Agency and Popularity: Kenyan “Socialites”, Femininities and Digital Media

Ligaga, Dina

doi:10.1080/23277408.2016.1272184

Cited by 23 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…From the published literature, however, women are either framed as incapable of feeling shame or endowed with the capacity to produce shame in others. It is unclear if, and how, these accounts explain why recently in South Africa, Malawi, Kenya and Zimbabwe women have been publicly stripped and humiliated in the streets and online spaces for their supposedly shameless sartorial and sexual choices (Ligaga 2014(Ligaga , 2016. These shaming assaults are undoubtedly disciplinary techniques deployed to inscribe heteropatriarchal ideals that attempt to normalize female corporeality and sexual practices.…”

Section: Shame As Formmentioning

confidence: 99%

Routledge Handbook of African Literature

Adejunmobi¹,

Coetzee

2019

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The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed an expansion of critical approaches to African literature. The Routledge Handbook of African Literature is a one-stop publication bringing together studies of African literary texts that embody an array of newer approaches applied to a wide range of works. This includes frameworks derived from food studies, utopian studies, network theory, eco-criticism, and examinations of the human/animal interface alongside more familiar discussions of postcolonial politics.The handbook is divided into seven parts: i) Mapping political agencies, ii) Journeys, geographies, identities, iii) Working through genre, iv) The world of and beyond humans, v) Everyday sociality, vi) Bodies, subjectivities, affect, vii) Literary networks. In each, contributors address the themes of the section from a variety of perspectives in conjunction with analysis of different literary texts. All chapters are original research essays written by a broad spectrum of scholars with expertise in the subject, providing an application of the most recent insights into analysis of particular topics or application of particular critical frameworks to one or more African literary works.The handbook will be a valuable interdisciplinary resource for scholars and students of African literature, African culture, postcolonial literature and literary analysis.

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Section: Shame As Formmentioning

confidence: 99%

Routledge Handbook of African Literature

Adejunmobi¹,

Coetzee

2019

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“…Consumer culture is marked as both post-feminist in this sense and feminine. In this vein, the ways that consumer culture and femininity collapse upon each other lead Dina Ligaga (2016) to consider the forms of visibility that women take through new media forms to also be practices of consumption. Nana Yaa's story-telling is a good example, as it is predicated on the 'view that people marked by femininity already have something in common and are in need of a conversation that feels intimate, revelatory, and a relief when it is mediated by commodities' (Berlant 2008: xi).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Feeling backwards: temporal ambivalence in An African City

Mupotsa

2019

Feminist Theory

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The turn to optimism makes figures of progress, consumption, self-making and empowerment appear in various genres of chick-lit. These narratives, however, are often still shaped by a depressive tone that is distinct from one that says that women have more options than happy-ever-after, even while heterosexual romance remains a structuring force. This article takes the Ghanaian web-series An African City as its example to explore this ambivalence. An African City offered its first season in 2014 and was immediately received as 'Africa's own Sex and the City', praised for challenging the image of a backward Africa, while criticised for offering an unrealistic account of life for urban African women. The series is set around the lives of five women, one of whom plays the leading role as narrator. The 'African city' serves as another character, rather than a mere backdrop for the action to unfold. I argue that the various characters perform an ongoing ambivalence towards progress, always stuck in a look backward. It is not simply that the quest for romance fails as part of the drama, but that the drama of failure itself folds onto both the African city and African women as figures that remain eternally stuck in their relation to the temporalities that accrue around modernity.

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