Gender, Interculturalism and Hausa Literary Spaces: A Lecture by Ousseina D. Alidou
The Hausa speaking world has been a crossroad of civilizations where people and cultures from the West African Sahel-Sahara have been in dialogue with the Amazigh (Berber) Arab and Mediterranean Civilizations, in both direct and indirect ways over the centuries.
These cultural interchanges were later mediated by the spread of Islam, from which emerged new forms of orality, literacy and literary traditions. Compounding the scene was the post-Ottoman Dispensation of a Hausaland divided between the British and the French colonial powers, adding new layers of orality and literacy practices based on Romanization that produced new literary traditions in dialogue with the pre-exisiting ones.
The aim of this presentation is to explore how this conjuncture of forces has led to the evolution of Hausa literatures as an intercultural phenomenon with a gendered manifestation.
More recently, this development has been redefined by other forms of transnationalism, both physical and virtual, engenered by globalization and the new technologies of mobility and communication. The end result has been new articulations of cosmopolitanism that has reconfigured the boundaries and substance of Hausaness, as amply demonstrated in its rich, gendered literary heritage.