“Tsitsi Dangarembga's essential new essay collection blazes with
her characteristic intellectual prowess, unstinting honesty, and
commitment to personal and political acts of resistance and
reclamation.”—Nadia Owusu
The first wound for all of us who are classified as “black” is
empire.
In Black and Female, Tsitsi Dangarembga examines the legacy of
imperialism on her own life and on every aspect of black embodied
African life.
This paradigm-shifting essay collection weaves the personal and
political in an illuminating exploration of race and gender.
Dangarembga recounts a painful separation from her parents as a
toddler, connecting this experience to the ruptures caused in Africa
by human trafficking and enslavement. She argues that, after
independence, the ruling party in Zimbabwe only performed inclusion
for women while silencing the work of self-actualized feminists. She
describes her struggles to realize her ambitions in theater, film,
and literature, laying out the long path to the publication of her
novels.
At once philosophical, intimate, and urgent, Black and Female
is a powerful testimony of the pervasive and long-lasting effects of
racism and patriarchy that provides an ultimately hopeful vision for
change. Black feminists are “the status quo’s worst nightmare.”
Dangarembga writes, “our conviction is deep, bolstered by a vivid
imagination that reminds us that other realities are possible beyond
the one that obtains.”