Description

The UWI Gender Journey is a bold volume that carefully documents the visionary commitment and struggles for recognition and respect of a relatively small cohort of dedicated feminist scholars, each of them powerful academics and leaders, as they collaborated to institutionalize gender and development studies at the University of West Indies. We learn about the origins of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies and how it came to provide global academic leadership in the field of gender and development studies.

The story of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies and all its preceding phases deserves to be told both because of its significant impact on regional scholarship and also because it exemplifies commitment to the legitimation of a fundamentally interdisciplinary academic undertaking with great importance for Caribbean social well-being. The UWI Gender Journey records a uniquely regional project and its broader momentum, offering powerful lessons for advocates for gender studies internationally. The authors also make clear that gender and development studies is an essential component of the global struggle against gender inequalities.

The audience for this work is both regional and global. The detailed descriptive account of how women and gender studies came to be in the University of the West Indies provides much of scholarly interest for academics elsewhere. Historians will find the volume invaluable for its wealth of details about how various Caribbean feminist scholars and their supporters responded to global development initiatives.

Bibliography

Joycelin Massiah is Professor and former Director, Institute of Social and Economic Research (Eastern Caribbean), University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados, and former Regional Director, United Nations Development Fund for Women, Caribbean Office (now UNWomen).

Elsa Leo-Rhynie is Professor Emerita of Gender and Development Studies and former Pro Vice-Chancellor and Principal, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica.

Barbara Bailey is Professor Emerita of Gender and Education and former University Director, Institute for Gender and Development Studies, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica.

Description

Malika Booker is a writer, spoken word and multidisciplinary artist, whose work spans literature, education and cross-arts. She has appeared world-wide both independently and with the British Council. Founder of the international writer development collective, Malika's Kitchen, Malika was Hampton Court Palace writer in residence in 2004 and Poet in Residence for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2011. Breadfruit, her first pamphlet, was commended by the PBS Selectors in 2007.

Description

It is 1971, a year after the Biafran War, and Nigeria is under military rule. The politics of the state matter less to eleven-year-old Enitan than whether her mother, now deeply religious since the death of Enitan's brother, will allow her friendship with the new girl next door, the brash and beautiful Sheri Bakare. Everything Good Will Come charts the unusual friendship and fate of these two girls; one who is prepared to manipulate the traditional system and one who attempts to defy it. Enitan's is the story of a fiercely intelligent, strong young woman coming of age in a culture that still insists on feminine submission. She sees the poverty and knows about the brutal military dictatorship but it is not until politics invades her own family that she defies her husband and moves from bystander to activist. She bucks the familial and political systems until she is confronted with the one desire that is too precious to forfeit in the name of personal freedom-her desire for a child.

Bibliography

Sefi Atta is the author of Everything Good Will Come, Swallow, News from Home, A Bit of Difference and Sefi Atta: Selected Plays. Sefi has received several literary awards, including the 2006 Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa and the 2009 Noma Award for Publishing in Africa. Her radio plays have been broadcast by the BBC and her stage plays have been performed internationally. She divides her time between the USA, UK and Nigeria