Tanya Lyons

Women, Resistance and Africa: Armed Struggles in Zimbabwe, South Africa and Eritrea

The three Australian-based authors have completed doctorates on African liberation movements. Following fieldwork in Eritrea, Zimbabwe and among South African exiles in the United Kingdom, we each reached a similar conclusion - that the role that women played in African national liberation struggles had been inadequately acknowledged. We were concerned that dominant interpretations of the content and context of resistance had excluded non-combat activities necessary to sustain military action. Drawing on the work on resistance by Foucault and Scott, we became interested in extending the range of theoretical material available to those engaged in analyzing the relationship between gender and national liberation in the African context

Reflections on the Dilemmas of Feminist Fieldwork in Africa

The feminist dilemmas of fieldwork in Africa are explored in this personal retrospective reflection on fieldwork conducted in Zimbabwe in the mid-1990s on the role of women in its anti-colonial liberation struggle. Lyons examines the challenges faced by the researcher in grappling the identity politics of ‘who can speak for whom’; the political issues of being a white, Western, middle-class, educated, female researcher examining women’s issues in Africa; and dealing with the basic logistics and travel requirements. By listening to the voices of women and enabling them to be heard within history, this chapter asks if any ‘woman’ researching in/on Africa has the emancipatory potential to challenge the dominant colonial and postcolonial discourses that have determined historical texts.

African challenges and challenges to African Studies

The study of African music traditionally falls under the academic discipline of ethnomusicology, but with this categorisation comes a degree of colonial baggage. Under the purview of ethnomusicology, many have approached the topic from sociological and/or anthropological perspectives, rather than musicological per se. While not without value, these approaches have tended to imbue African music with mysticism rather than engage with the music analytically. In this context has arisen an anti-formalist position, which suggests that it is inappropriate to analyse African music, because to do so is to impose an external world view on the subject. As has been powerfully argued, however, those who take this position simultaneously practise and apply other disciplinary formalisms to the subject, which opens up a raft of further questions and issues regarding the study of the cultural ‘other’. Recent developments in the musical academy have questioned the dichotomy of musicological and ethnomusicological practices. Further, a body of African scholars, led by Kofi Agawu, is recasting African music as a musicological rather than ethnomusicological topic. This approach calls for scholars to value, demand and practise greater structural analysis therein: to deny African music the right to analysis, some argue, is to deny it the right to legitimacy. This article discusses some of the key positions and practices in the historical study of African music, recent developments in detail, and projected futures for the discipline. The author draws upon his own first-hand experience of studying and analysing African music in Ghana and Zimbabwe, and of teaching African music in Australia, to offer perspectives on the challenges and inherent value in studying and analysing the music of Africa. Introduction The study of African music traditionally falls under the academic discipline of ethnomusicology, a discipline that has always struggled for a cohesive definition of itself. The discipline began as a consequence of