Selfish Gifts

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Selfish Gifts
Senegalese Women's Autobiographical Discourses

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Lisa McNee - Author

Price: $50.50
Hardcover - 216 pages

Release Date: June 2000

ISBN10: 0-7914-4587-9
ISBN13: 978-0-7914-4587-7

Price: $31.95
Paperback - 216 pages

Release Date: June 2000

ISBN10: 0-7914-4588-7
ISBN13: 978-0-7914-4588-4

Available as a Google eBook for other eReaders and tablet devices. Click icon below...

Summary

Winner of the Joel Gregory Prize 2000, presented by the Canadian Association of African Studies

Investigates the politics and poetics of women's gendered identity in West Africa.

Offering Senegalese women's autobiographical discourses as an original contribution to the critical debate about identity and self-representation, Lisa McNee asks how Senegalese women represent themselves, rather than asking who has the right to represent them. Selfish Gifts describes and analyzes the public spaces for verbal self-representation that the Wolof form of panegyric (taasu) and written autobiographies offer to women. In contrasting performances of taasu to autobiographical works written in French, McNee addresses important issues in literary criticism, folklore studies, and anthropology, and develops a theory of an African aesthetic of self-representation.

"McNee makes an exciting and original contribution to scholarship on African women's self-expression. In her chapters on Wolof oral forms, McNee is on truly new ground, and her methodology and insights are remarkable. Her work will be of great interest to scholars and students who are used to reading about African literature--often derived and transcribed from oral sources--but who more rarely see this kind of first-hand account of living orality." -- Christopher L. Miller, author of Nationalists and Nomads: Essays on Francophone African Literature and Culture

Lisa McNee is Assistant Professor of French Studies at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Pre-Face

The Other's Face Might Be Your Own

Chapter 1: Autobiographical Subjects

Chapter 2: The Gift of Praise

Chapter 3: Panegyrics

Chapter 4: Genre and Gender in the Autobiographical Exchange

Chapter 5: The Politics of Praise

Chapter 6: Aborted Nations

Chapter 7: Terms of Exchange

Post-Face: Selfish Gifts

Notes

Sound Recordings

Works Cited

Index

Related Subjects

African Studies
Comparative Literature
Women's Studies

36325/36328(ZL/SG/FK)

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