Confronting entrenched social inequality and inadequate access to resources, women across Africa are working with determination and imagination to improve their material conditions and to blaze a clear path for their daughters and granddaughters. The thirty-one African-born contributors to this book move beyond the linked dichotomies of victim/oppressor and victim/heroine to present their experiences of resistance in full complexity: they are at the forward edge of the tide of women's empowerment that, at the start of the twenty-first century, is moving across the African continent. Contributions illuminate the effect on women of women's poverty and lack of access to education, health care, credit, and political power; HIV/AIDS; female genital cutting; Sharia law; armed conflict and rape as a weapon of war; displacement and exile; women's oppressions within heterosexual relationships; resistant sexualities; intergenerational conflict and tensions between tradition and modernity.

African Women Writing Resistance is the first transnational anthology to focus on women's strategies of resistance to the challenges they face in Africa today. The anthology brings together personal narratives, testimony, interviews, short stories, poetry, performance scripts, folktales, and lyrics. Thematically organized, it presents women's writing on such issues as intertribal and interethnic conflicts, the degradation of the environment, polygamy, domestic abuse, the controversial traditional practice of female genital cutting, Sharia law, intergenerational tensions, and emigration and exile. Contributors include internationally recognized authors and activists such as Wangari Maathai and Nawal El Saadawi, as well as a host of vibrant new voices from all over the African continent and from the African diaspora. Interdisciplinary in scope, this collection provides an excellent introduction to contemporary African women's literature and highlights social issues that are particular to Africa but are also of worldwide concern. It is an essential reference for students of African studies, world literature, anthropology, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and women's studies. A Choice Outstanding Academic Book Outstanding Book, selected by the Public Library Association Best Books for High Schools, Best Books for Special Interests, and Best Books for Professional Use, selected by the American Association of School Libraries