Chima Jacob Korieh - Gendering Global Transformations: Gender, Culture, Race, and Identity

Gender, Culture, Race, and Identity

First published 2009
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016

Simultaneously published in the UK
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

2009 Taylor & Francis

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Gendering global transformations : gender, culture, race, and identity / edited by Chima J. Korieh and Philomina Okeke-Ihejirika.
p. cm. -- (Routledge research in gender and society ; 16)
The papers in this volume were presented at the second international conference of the Transatlantic Research Group held at the Alvan Ikoku College of Education, Owerri, Nigeria in July 2006--Pref.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-415-96325-1
1. Sex role and globalization--Congresses. 2. Gender identity--Congresses. 3. Ethnicity--Congresses. I. Korieh, Chima J. (Chima Jacob), 1962- II. Okeke-Ihejirika, Philomina E. (Philomina Ezeagbor)
HQ1075.G46722 2009
305.8009'051--dc22
2008009269

Chima J. Korieh and Philomina Okeke-Ihejirika have compiled and edited a volume on Gendering Global Transformations: Gender, Culture, Race, and Identity that is very much needed as a means for promoting and sustaining a dialogue among scholars in Africa and its diaspora on this theme. Altogether, the contributions of the volume explore the richness and complexity of continuities and transformations in gender ideologies and relations of continental and diasporic Africans, framed by interactive, dynamic global forces affecting their individual and group histories over the past 500 years. This foreword comments briefly on two of these global forces

To begin with, this volume is being published following the initiation of the commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the Abolition of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade (TAST) in 2007 in the United Kingdom, the Caribbean, parts of South America, and at the United Nations in New York as well as (in a less robust manner) in the United States of America in 2008. The resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, which commemorated the Abolition of the TAST on March 25, 2007, recalled that the brutality of the TAST between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries was among the worst viola tions of human rights in the history of humanity and a crime against humanity. The commemorative activities are a stark reminder that the creation of the African Diaspora began in large part through the TAST, which resulted in the involuntary migration of untold millions of Africansmen, women, and childrenwho were enslaved and transported to Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere. The dehumanizing conditions of slavery and the legacies and intergenerational consequences of the TAST and colonialism shaped the complex history of Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and the Americas and are at the core of social, political, and economic inequality, hatred, racism, and prejudice, which continue to affect people of African descent today. Yet there is a continuing knowledge gap and denial that exists regarding these linkages and the historic and continuing role of Continental and diasporic Africans to the growth and development of Europe and the Americas.