Female genital excision, or the ritual of cutting the external
genitals of girls and women, is undoubtedly one of the most heavily
and widely debated cultural traditions of our time. By looking at
how writers of African descent have presented the practice in their
literary work, Elisabeth Bekers shows how the debate on female
genital excision evolved over the last four decades of the
twentieth century, in response to changing attitudes about
ethnicity, nationalism, colonialism, feminism, and human rights.
Rising Anthills (the title refers to a Dogon myth) analyzes works
in English, French, and Arabic by African and African American
writers, both women and men, from different parts of the African
continent and the diaspora. Attending closely to the nuances of
language and the complexities of the issue, Bekers explores
lesser-known writers side by side with such recognizable names as
Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Flora Nwapa, Nawal El Saadawi, Ahmadou Kourouma,
Calixthe Beyala, Alice Walker, and Gloria Naylor. Following their
literary discussions of female genital excision, she discerns a
gradual evolution-from the 1960s, when writers mindful of its
communal significance carefully ""wrote around"" the physical
operation, through the 1970s and 1980s, when they began to speak
out against the practice and their societies' gender politics, to
the late 1990s, when they situated their denunciations of female
genital excision in a much broader, international context of
women's oppression and the struggle for women's rights.
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