African Women Under Fire

Pauline Uwakweh’s edited volume brings out a fresh and equally significant perspective that focuses upon the much-needed African women’s literary responses to wars and armed conflicts. . . Pauline Uwakweh beautifully gives a critique of a patriarchy and especially literary patriarchy, while bringing war and gender issues under study. Her book demonstrates how women’s voices are missing in war literature and what can be done to overcome this lacuna. Women under Fire is certainly going to be an authentic source on literary discourse on war and conflict besides being a credible work on African literary criticism in the gender arena. Given its thick description the work is too provoking for future researchers not to go further and deeper into the themes touched upon. Throughout the chapters there been an intellectual engagement with various socio-literary themes bringing out various war realities especially the gendered relations and power play between them. This work can indeed be called Pauline Uwakweh’s and her fellow coauthors’ labor of love. * African Studies Quarterly *
Touching on the war experiences of African women, including combat, captivity, and rape, the nine essays in African Women Under Fire: Literary Discourses in War and Conflict, edited by Pauline Ada Uwakweh, engage female agency, resiliency, trauma, violence, and the roles of memory and testimony. Bringing together a wide variety of theories and approaches, the contributors re-examine African war literature from a gendered, postcolonial frame that encompasses trauma studies, psychoanalysis, immigration studies, and the problems of representation. -- Joya Uraizee, Saint Louis University
For too long in the history of fiction writing in Africa, the tendency has been to portray women as literary shadows of male creative imagination. In African Women Under Fire: Literary Discourses in War and Conflict, one senses in the critical essays on women’s war literature, a significant and necessary step towards disrupting the masculinization of the African critical enterprise in the literary domain. Never again will African women’s creative voices be mere appendages in anthologies composed by men. -- Maurice Taonezvi Vambe, University of South Africa