"my Story Bursts Forth...": Re-visioning Female Subjecthood in Gendered Folktales in Northern Ghana

Abstract

This paper examines contemporary retellings of Ghanaian (Kasem) folktales that engage critically with the social roles and cultural values in the traditional corpus. While in traditional folktales supernatural forces are unleashed to punish females who pursue their own strivings, thus regulating gender identity, in the retold tales female protagonists deploy nantandia, a local Kasem term which encompasses intelligence, initiative and courage, to thwart the power of the supernatural and assert their own subjecthood.