Introduction: Decolonizing African women's studies

Abstract

The Palgrave Handbook of African Women's Studies is a distinctive reference book bringing together knowledge, scholarship, analysis, and debates on African women's themes and issues everywhere. It unearths, critiques, reviews, analyzes, theorizes, synthesizes, and evaluates African women's historical, social, political, economic, local and global lives, and experiences with a view to decolonizing the corpus. The chapters in this volume question the gendered roles and positions of African women and the structures, institutions, and processes of policy, politics, and knowledge production that continually construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct African women and the study of them. Thus, this Handbook enlarges the scope of the field, challenges its orthodoxies, and engenders new subjects, theories, and approaches. In this way, the Palgrave Handbook of AfricanWomen's Studies not only curates but also charts a path for the study of African women in all their variegated contexts and complexities from competing standpoints, centering women in the African world and worldview historically and contemporarily, and from multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary lenses. Importantly too, this Handbook creates space and opportunities for giving voice to African women everywhere to tell their stories and share their experiences, working with African women everywhere, thus representing a space for amplifying African women's voices. This introductory chapter elucidates the objectives of the Handbook; engages the contentions and contestations in African women's studies that propelled its unique decolonial approach; reviews the currents in the field over time; reveals its asymmetries and coloniality; and provides a detailed narrative map for navigating the parts and chapters in the Handbook.