The Palgrave Handbook of African Women's Studies

This definitive handbook is the first reference of its kind bringing together knowledge, scholarship, and debates on themes and issues concerning African women everywhere. It unearths, critiques, reviews, analyses, theorizes, synthesizes and evaluates African women’s historical, social, political, economic, local and global lives and experiences with a view to decolonizing the corpus. This Handbook questions the gendered roles and positions of African women and the structures, institutions, and processes of policy, politics, and knowledge production that continually construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct African women and the study of them. Contributors offer a consistent emphasis on debunking erroneous and misleading myths about African women's roles and positions, bringing their previously marginalized stories to relief, and ultimately re-writing their histories. Thus, this Handbook enlarges the scope of the field, challenges its orthodoxies, and engenders new subjects, theories,and approaches. This reference work includes, to the greatest extent possible, the voices of African women themselves as writers of their own stories. The detailed, rigorous and up-to-date analyses in the work represent a variety of theoretical, methodological, and transdisciplinary approaches. This reference work will prove vital in charting new directions for the study of African women, and will reverberate in future studies, generating new debates and engendering further interest.

Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso is Professor of Political Science at Babcock University, Nigeria, where she has taught since 2002. She has published ten books and dozens of articles and book chapters on international relations, gender studies and comparative politics. Professor Yacob-Haliso is co-editor of the Rowman & Littlefield book series, Africa: Past, Present & Prospects, and the Journal of Contemporary African Studies, among others. She serves on the editorial board of African Affairs, Journal of International Women’s Studies, Peace Studies and Practice, Journal of International Politics and Development, and so on. For her research, Olajumoke has been awarded grants and fellowships of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), African Studies Association (ASA), Carnegie Africa Diaspora Fellowship Program (CADFP), International Development Research Centre (IDRC), University for Peace Africa Program (UPEACE), Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), American Political Science Association (APSA), and others. Professor Yacob-Haliso has been visiting scholar to universities in Africa, Europe and the United States, including Rhodes University, South Africa, the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Switzerland,Boston University,USA and many others. Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso is incoming co-chair (2020-2023) of the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies (FTGS) Section of the International Studies Association (ISA), and currently Dean of the Veronica Adeleke School of Social Sciences at Babcock University, Nigeria.

Toyin Falola, Professor of History, University Distinguished Teaching Professor, and the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, the University of Texas at Austin. He is an Honorary Professor, University of Cape Town, and Extraordinary Professor of Human Rights, University of the Free State, South Africa. He had served asthe General Secretary of the Historical Society of Nigeria, the President of the African Studies Association, Vice-President of UNESCO Slave Route Project, and the Kluge Chair of the Countries of the South, Library of Congress. He is a member of the Scholars’ Council, Kluge Center, and the Library of Congress. He is a Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge University, Fellow of the Historical Society of Nigeria and a Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters.He has received over thirty lifetime career awards and fourteen honorary doctorates. Palgrave-Macmillan in 2016 released a book on him by Abdul Karim Bangura, Toyin Falola and African Epistemologies and another was published by Carolina Academic Press in 2019, Falolaism: The Epistemologies and Methodologies of Africana Knowledge.Falola has published over a hundred and fifty books, some of his latest including the Palgrave Handbook of African Oral Traditions and Folklore, the Palgrave Handbook of Islam in Africa,and the Palgrave Handbook of African Education and Indigenous Knowledge.