Emergent Masculinities : Gendered Power and Social Change in the Biafran Atlantic Age

Authors

Ndubueze L. Mbah

Files

Series

New African Histories

Description

In Emergent Masculinities, Ndubueze L. Mbah argues that the Bight of Biafra region’s Atlanticization—or the interaction between regional processes and Atlantic forces such as the slave trade, colonialism, and Christianization—between 1750 and 1920 transformed gender into the primary mode of social differentiation in the region. He incorporates over 250 oral narratives of men and women across a range of social roles and professions with material culture practices, performance traditions, slave ship data, colonial records, and more to reveal how Africans channeled the socioeconomic forces of the Atlantic world through their local ideologies and practices. The gendered struggles over the means of social reproduction conditioned the Bight of Biafra region’s participation in Atlantic systems of production and exchange, and defined the demography of the region’s forced diaspora. By looking at male and female constructions of masculinity and sexuality as major indexes of social change, Emergent Masculinities transforms our understanding of the role of gender in precolonial Africa and fills a major gap in our knowledge of a broader set of theoretical and comparative issues linked to the slave trade and the African diaspora.

Copyright Statement

Emergent Masculinities © 2019 by Ohio University Press is licensed under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-ND. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Language

eng

ISBN

9780821446850

Publication Date

10-29-2019

Publisher

Ohio University Press

City

Athens

Keywords

Eastern Africa, Nigeria, African History, Gender Roles, Igbo, Masculinity, Sex roles, Slave Trade

Disciplines

African Studies | Ethnic Studies | Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Mbah, Ndubueze L., "Emergent Masculinities : Gendered Power and Social Change in the Biafran Atlantic Age" (2019). Ohio University Press Open Access Books. 63.
https://ohioopen.library.ohio.edu/oupress/63