Rebecca J. Cook and the contributors to this volume seek to analyze how international human rights law applies specifically to women in various cultures worldwide, and to develop strategies to promote equitable application of human rights law at the international, regional, and domestic levels. Their essays present a compelling mixture of reports and case studies from various regions in the world, combined with scholarly assessments of international law as these rights specifically apply to women.

In spite of decolonisation, the philosophical character of European standpoint on colonisation together with its corresponding practices remains unchanged in its relations with the erstwhile colonies. It is precisely this condition which calls for the need for the authentic liberation of Africa. This speaks of a two-fold exigency. One is that the colonised people's conceptions of reality, knowledge and truth should be released from slavery and dominance under the European epistemological paradigm. Without this essential first step there cannot evolve a (...) common authentic and liberating universe of discourse. The second exigency is that the evolving common universe of discourse must take into account the rational demands of justice to the colonised arising from the unjust wars of conquest that resulted in colonial disseizing of territory as well as the enslavement of the colonised. These rational demands of justice are specifically the restoration of territory to its indigenous rightful owners and reparations to them. This two fold exigency is the indisplensable neccessity for the authentic liberation of Africa, and indeed, all the colonised people of the world. (shrink)

This essay is an attempt to plumb the conventions which exist at a specific historical moment in both the aesthetic and scientific spheres. I will assume the existence of a web of conventions within the world of the aesthetic—conventions which have elsewhere been admirably illustrated—but will depart from the norm by examining the synchronic existence of another series of conventions, those of medicine. I do not mean in any way to accord special status to medical conventions. Indeed, the world is (...) full of overlapping and intertwined systems of conventions, of which the medical and the aesthetic are but two. Medicine offers an especially interesting source of conventions since we do tend to give medical conventions special “scientific” status as opposed to the “subjective” status of the aesthetic conventions. But medical icons are no more “real” than “aesthetic” ones. Like aesthetic icons, medical icons may iconographic in that they represent these realities in a manner determined by the historical position of the observers, their relationship to their own time, and to the history of the conventions which they employ. Medicine uses its categories to structure an image of the diversity of mankind; it is as much at the mercy of the needs of any age to comprehend this infinite diversity as any other system which organizes our perception of the world. The power of medicine, at least in the nineteenth century, lies in the rise of the status of science. He conventions of medicine infiltrate other seemingly closed iconographic systems precisely because of this status. In examining the conventions of medicine employed in other areas, we must not forget this power.One excellent example of the conventions of human diversity captured in the iconography of the nineteenth century is the linkage of two seemingly unrelated female images—the icon of the Hottentot female and the icon of the prostitute. In the course of the nineteenth century, the female Hottentot comes to represent the black female in nuce, and the prostitute to represent the sexualized woman. Both of these categories represent the creation of classes which correspondingly represent very specific qualities. While the number of terms describing the various categories of the prostitute expanded substantially during the nineteenth century, all were used to label the sexualized woman. Likewise, while many groups of African blacks were known to Europeans in the nineteenth century, the Hottentot remained representative of the essence of the black, especially the black female. Both concepts fulfilled an iconographic function in the perception and the representation of the world. How these two concepts were associated provides a case study for the investigation of patterns of conventions, without any limitation on the “value” of one pattern over another. Sander L. Gilman is professor of Humane Studies in the Department of German Literature and Near Eastern Studies and professor of Psychiatry in the Cornell Medical College, Cornell University. He is the author or editor of numerous studies of European cultural history with a focus on the history of stereotypes. In addition, he has coedited Degeneration with J. E. Chamberlin. His study Jewish Self-Hatred is forthcoming. (shrink)

African feminism, this landmark volume demonstrates, differs radically from the Western forms of feminism with which we have become familiar since the 1960s. African feminists are not, by and large, concerned with issues such as female control over reproduction or variation and choice within human sexuality, nor with debates about essentialism, the female body, or the discourse of patriarchy. The feminism that is slowly emerging in Africa is distinctly heterosexual, pronatal, and concerned with "bread, butter, and power" issues. Contributors present (...) case studies of ten African states, demonstrating that—as they fight for access to land, for the right to own property, for control of food distribution, for living wages and safe working conditions, for health care, and for election reform—African women are creating a powerful and specifically African feminism. (shrink)

This Bridge Called My Back - writings by radical women of color, is an anthology that two decades ago, called for 'a radical restructuring of this country' [ie the United States of America]. On the afternoon of September 11, 2001, Cherríe Moraga began her task of composing the foreword to the book's third edition. The bombing of America's World Trade Centre reminded her of the extent to which invasion and terrorism have, for five centuries, been a part life for Third (...) World people living in America, and in her essay she reflects that although the September Eleventh attacks shattered for the white residents of that country, their illusions of safety within its borders, that for the residents of colour, such illusions had rarely even existed. She draws analogies too, between the way that white middle-class American life style is lived, both on a national level and on an international one at the expense of people of colour, and she reiterates her plea of twenty years earlier, that the United States must cure itself of its racism and its sexism so that it can grow into wholeness. -/- -/- -/- This widely acclaimed and ground-breaking anthology comprises various sections of such dense and such diverse writing - poetry, free prose, academic essay - that I found it impossible to condense my thoughts about it into the few words of a book review. It includes the current, the 1983 and the 1981 forewords, prefaces and introductions. It contains also, a number of colour and monochrome reproductions of resistance, protest and subversive artwork from the 1970's that are intended as more 'words' for the reader to mull over (with a little help from Celia Herrera Rodríguez's explanatory curatorial statement.) So one can look at and learn some background to images of protest such as Betye Saar's 'The Liberation of Aunt Jemima' (a black nanny depicted with squalling white babe tucked under one arm whilst she brandishes a large gun in the other hand) or the energisingly subversive depiction of Yolanda López's 'Portrait of the Artist as the Virgen de Guadalupe.' . (shrink)

Investigates the role of violence in social change, as reflected in its use by colonized peoples to achieve the liberation of the Third World.