Conversational Bridges in African Feminisms: Weaving Knowledge Together

Affirming dialogue as a mode of knowledge production across identity positions and generational differences, Conversational Bridges in African Feminisms: Weaving Knowledge Together highlights the power of this method in building and sustaining African feminist communities. The conversations explore diverse terrain: from critical discussions on current geopolitics and its influence on women, to sexuality, class, and power struggles globally, and responses needed to address the scourge of gender-based violence. By centralising the power of dialogue among feminist scholars, activists and artists, the collection shows how African feminists theorise their lived experiences and in so doing build communities of activism, of care and of solidarity.

HSRC Press

Product Information

Format:

229x152mm

Pages:

232pp

ISBN-13:

978-0-7969-2696-8

Publish Year:

October 2025

Rights:

World Rights

PREFACE

Six Mountains on Our Backs: The (In)visible Labour of African Feminist Spaces Sharlene Khan and Lynda Spencer

INTRODUCTION

Conversational Bridges: A Dialogic Approach to Feminist Community-Building

Polo B. Moji, Kharnita Mohamed and Aika Swai

PART 1: IN SEARCH OF OUR SHRINES

CHAPTER 1

Towards a Psycho-Politics of Feminist Community: (Re)Imagining Care with Mmatshilo Motsei

Peace Kiguwa

CHAPTER 2

Art on Our Mind, Art in our Hands: Autobiographical Storytelling as African Feminist Praxis

Sophie Peters, Sharlene Khan, and Nono Motlhoki

CHAPTER 3

Elaine Salo’s “ABC on African Feminisms:” Epistemic Community as a Practice of Reading Together

Koni Benson, Lorna Houston, Yaliwe Clarke, Polo B. Moji and Benita Moolman

PART 2: ABUNDANT PEDAGOGIES

CHAPTER 4

Anything but Fiction: Black South African Women’s Novels as Theory in And Wrote My Story Anyway (2020)

Barbara Boswell, Gogontle Mosiakgabo and Aika Swai

CHAPTER 5

Celebrating Pluriversal Epistemic Visibility in Surfacing: On Being Black and Feminist in South Africa (2021)

Nadia Davids, Gabeba Baderoon and Aika Swai

CHAPTER 6

Feminist Refusal and the Effervescent Archive in Women, Visibility and Morality in Kenyan Popular Media (2020)

Dina Ligaga and Polo B. Moji

CHAPTER 7

Mediating Intergenerational Relationality in Sasinda Futhi Siselapha: Black Feminist Approaches to Cultural Studies in South Africa’s Twenty-Six Years Since 1994

Derilene Marco, Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, Abebe Zegeye and Santi (Michael Santiago) Roman

PART 3: SOLIDARITIES AS BRIDGES

CHAPTER 8

Enraged Writing as Feminist Activism: Bridging the Personal-Political of Gendered Violence in Female Fear Factory

Pumla Dineo Gqola, Lenina Rassool and Polo B. Moji

CHAPTER 9

Transfeminisms in Africa

Robert Hamblin, Landa Mabenge, Sandile Ndelu, sivgreyson, Hazel Jojo and Kharnita Mohamed

CHAPTER 10

Transformative Feminist Leadership: Solidarity as a Politics of Care and Love

Tlaleng Mofokeng, Pregs Govender and Kharnita Mohamed

APPENDIX: Remembering “The ABC of African Feminisms”

Lessons in Race and African Feminism

Elaine Rosa Salo

CONTRIBUTORS

INDEX

Polo B. Moji is a literary scholar whose research interests range from intersectional feminisms, comparative anglophone / francophone African and Afrodiasporic literatures, as well as critical black geographies. She has co-edited the special journal issues “Ghostly Border-Crossings: Europe in Afrodiasporic Narratives” (2019), “The Cinematic City: Desire, Form and the African Urban” (2019) and “Cinematic Imaginaries of the African City” (2021). Her monograph Gender and the Spatiality of Blackness in Contemporary AfroFrench Narratives (Routledge2022) is winner of the African Literature Association First Book Award. She is the principal investigator for the National Research Foundation funded project “African Literary Cities: Hubs, Maps and Literary Urban Ecologies” in collaboration with the African Centre for Cities.

Institutional Affiliation: University of Cape Town. ORCIRD Number: 0000-0002-9109-3075

Kharnita Mohamed lectures in Anthropology at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Her research is focused on epistemology, death, debility, disability, race and gender towards developing conceptual tools for thinking about the perdurance and aftermath of violences, in and for the Global South. In2020, she received the UCT Humanities Faculty’s Dean’s Teaching Award. Her debut novel, Called to Song received the 2020 UCT Meritorious Book Award, and was shortlisted for the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences Fiction Award. She co-edited the edited volume, Pluriversal Conversations on Transnational Feminisms (Routledge, 2024) and a journal Special Issue on Gender and Disability (2015).

Institutional Affiliation: University of Cape Town. ORCIRD Number: 0000-0002-9024-9496.

Aika Swai has more than 20 years of teaching experience at high-school and undergraduate levels, including curriculum development and instructional coaching. She is passionate about drama-based teaching strategies such as performance-lecturing and completing her PhD in English Literary Studies at the University of Cape Town. Her research and teaching interests include the representation/ communicability of so-called supernatural events and related debates around epistemic justice in African, Caribbean, and American Indian literature. As a current recipient of the 2021-2024 Institute of the Creative Arts (ICA) PhD Scholarship, Aika increasingly experiments with the difference between performing vs writing her dissertation. Institutional Affiliation: University of Cape Town.

Endorsements

“Extraordinarily moving, refreshing and endlessly generative! Courageous, liberatory, and uncompromising, “Conversational Bridges” is powered by a bold African feminist language that is visionary, insistent on existing, and world-making.This book nourishes and carries ancestral wisdom forward, building enduring worlds of African feminist and transfeminist care, community, solidarity and connection. It theorises dialogue and conversation not merely as exchange but as intentional practices of knowledge production—stitching together generations, memories and archives.

Essential reading for any aspiring, curious and seasoned feminist!” zethu Matebeni, PhD independent scholar