By: Marjorie Pryse, Women's Studies
Among the array of ideas, information, and challenges that the Internationalizing Women's Studies Conference and Institute last June helped generate, one in particular has inspired me to think about reimagining an interweaving of teaching, scholarship, and local activism. I would like to propose further dialogue on collectively learning from the Women's Studies Department at the University of Buea.
Nalova Lyonga, who developed Women's Studies at Buea, offered significant cross-cultural insight into the ways Women's Studies emerges from and adapts to local cultural and economic needs. At Buea, for example, faculty have linked Women's Studies to the development process in Africa, view Women's Studies as a way to recover what Africans lost in colonialism, and connect Women's Studies to specific employment objectives for students. As a result, Women's Studies has become the most successful major at Buea in attracting students, and half of those undergraduate majors are men.
The titles of two courses in the curriculum suggest the ways Lyonga's department combines the practical and the theoretical. "Postcolonialism, Gender, and Development," a course that balances Women-in-Development and Gender-and-Development as alternative models, seems to address the specific economic concerns of students, and is a course that parallels U.S. curriculum material on global development processes. The course "Ideology and the Management of Meaning," however, raises a conceptual challenge for U.S. feminists, as it appears to bring together three universes of discourse: political theory, business, and humanistic spirituality.
Conceptual challenge characterizes as well the approach Lyonga brought to bear on questions of differences in feminism. She explained her response to critics who believe that women cannot move forward because they disagree among themselves: "Why expect there to be no cracks in sisterhood?" she asked. "There are cracks in brotherhood. Why don't you ask another question?" The particular question she and her colleagues have asked instead concerns how to link scholarship and community activism. Her description of their project in what she termed "home-schooled feminism" leads me to propose dialogue concerning how Women's Studies in the U.S. might do more in the 1990s to connect feminist research and community-based activism.
Buea faculty identified as one of their primary objectives a project to counteract the resistance in primary schools to Women's Studies education. They proposed to "teach the mothers," to move away from book-centered learning, and to create a "holiday camp" that would involve mothers and their children outside the school setting in a way that would enhance the home as an educational unit. Believing that if they helped mothers to develop in their thinking about girls, the mothers themselves would educate the children, they were able to work around resistance in the schools and to accomplish their objectives.
I found myself inventing a grant project as I listened to Lyonga: Why could we not raise money to offer participant mothers from demographically-diverse elementary schools college credit in Women's Studies for interacting with and learning from each other and from Women's Studies undergraduates (who would earn credit in Women's Studies)? The project might enhance cross-generational dialogue, would provide the basis for a group of mothers to network as an ongoing support group after the course ended, and would by its very structure create a diverse, integrated group of women across school districts who might find ways of providing support for each other, support that might promote the emergence of cross-class as well as cross-cultural mutuality.
Long after Professor Lyonga ended her presentation, her strategy has continued to incubate for me. The germination of this idea seems like such a direct way (and so obvious that it is hard to believe it takes someone from as far away as Africa to introduce it) of addressing one of our seemingly most insoluble problems in the U.S., namely: how to work around the conservative politics of school-boards and local communities to help women and children outside the university benefit directly in their own lives from the insights and processes of Women's Studies education.
How might we adapt Lyonga's African model to our own context? Too often in an international frame Western women have been chastised, or have critiqued each other, for trying to "export" U.S. versions of feminism to women elsewhere. But we have allowed ourselves to remain mired in this political and theoretical quagmire. As Nalova Lyonga cut through this morass by suggesting, "Why not ask another question?," and by linking conceptual contexts that would seem unlikely in a U.S. setting, she also suggested a model for reinvigorating feminism here. Why not import feminism from Africa? Why not learn from our colleagues at the University of Buea, who have been more successful than we have in creating university support for Women's Studies, concerning how to revitalize feminist education in the U.S.? By providing a forum for Nalova Lyonga to speak, the conference left behind this legacy: Internationalizing Women's Studies, specifically Africanizing Women's Studies, can provide a model for enhancing cross-cultural feminist insight right here.
Anyone interested in working on grant-writing for adapting the University of Buea's African model of "teaching the mothers" to a project through the University at Albany, or of engaging in further dialogue concerning the potential of this model, please contact me: mpryse@cnsvax.albany.edu or 518-442-4070.