Selfish Gifts: Senegalese Women's Autobiographical Discourses

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

Winner of the 2001 Joel Gregory Prize, presented by the Canadian Association of African Studies

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.