The collected essays in Pathos and Power provide a critical exploration of widowhood in Africa through a series of historical and contemporary case studies. The book challenges a simplistic understanding of widowhood by highlighting how the experience varies according to age, class, race, religion, and geographic location. The contributors investigate how the category of widowhood can obscure or reveal various social dynamics while demonstrating the diversity of material, symbolic, and embodied circumstances faced by African widows. The volume considers the forces shaping the lives of widows by examining the structural and legal challenges they encounter, including discriminatory practices in social, economic, and political spheres. Through discussions of precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial contexts, it explores the intersections of custom, law, patriarchy, and feminism while delving into the potentially liberatory opportunities that widowhood sometimes presents. The book also raises broader questions about gender, personhood, marriage, autonomy, and national identity, emphasizing how widowhood informs key conceptual debates in African studies. Editors Joanna Davidson and Benjamin N. Lawrance bring together scholars across such fields as anthropology, gender studies, history, law, and political science. The authors employ a range of methodologies, including archival research, ethnography, and storytelling, to illuminate widowhood in new and innovative ways. The volume's rich empirical studies and theoretical insights offer a valuable resource for scholars seeking to understand widowhood and its broader implications in African societies. CONTRIBUTORS Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf Fisayo Ajala Catherine E. Bolten Abbass Braham Mariana Candido Joanna Davidson Mariana Dias Paes Ramadan El-Khouli Casey Golomski Juelma Gomes de Matos Ngala Benjamin N. Lawrance Kenda Mutongi Richard L. Roberts Enid Schildkrout Kate Skinner Wallace Teska Benjamin Twagira Sarah J. Zimmerman
Industry Reviews
A brilliant, compelling collection that forces us to rethink the predicaments and experiences of widows and, through the lens of their lives, review our assumptions and theories of gender relations, power, and property in Africa. A smart, comprehensive introduction frames this must-read, must-teach volume. - Dorothy Hodgson, editor in chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of African Women's History A riveting account of widows' rites and rights! The statistics are staggering and the stories undeniably authentic, yet remarkably visceral. There is no doubt, the time for an optional protocol to CEDAW to end all forms of violence against widows is yesterday. - Eleanor Nwadinobi, president of the Widows Development Organisation and the Medical Women's International Association Pathos and Power, with a rich and reflective preface by Enid Schildkrout, offers a fresh scholarly view on the complex condition of widowhood in African societies. The wide-ranging chapters in this volume offer thoughtful engagements with widows as social actors who navigate issues of risk belonging, kinship, rights, and more. - Emily S. Burrill, author of States of Marriage: Gender, Justice, and Rights in Colonial Mali Joanna Davidson and Benjamin Lawrance's aptly titled Pathos and Power is the most comprehensive and provocative study of the topic since Kenda Mutongi's path-breaking Worries of the Heart: Widows, Family, and Community in Kenya. The editors have brought together a stellar array of scholars to explore themes central to the experience of widows: the expectation to remarry, the problem of inheritance, the agency or presence of their children, and above all the social and emotional performance necessary to navigate burial, commemoration, and the many challenges that will follow. In each case, context is crucial to women's strategies, whether in early colonial courts in Senegal, Islamic courts in the Sahara, or asylum courts in the United States. The emotional valence of widowhood may be framed differently: by a secretive wartime context, by the attitudes of other women regarding proper mourning, or by the shadow of HIV/AIDS. The collection provides indispensable contemporary scholarship on an increasingly common condition facing African women today. For such women the contours of widowhood may be varied even as many elements of their predicament are shared. - Barbara Cooper, author of Yearning and Refusal: An Ethnography of Female Fertility Management in Niamey, Niger
