| Abstrakt: |
Sahrāwī women were rendered virtually absent in Spain’s colonial record of its Western Saharan territories, and this has since been ossified in generational layers of scholarship in the postcolonial era. As this last colony of Africa engages in projects for self-determination, return to homeland and nascent state formation, the development–humanitarian nexus has sometimes been sceptical about women’s sudden visibility in empowered roles in refugee camp administration and the political conflict. This essay makes two interventions. First, it offers a postcolonial feminist examination of these ossified histories from which to foreground ethnographically Sahrāwī women’s organizing principles of matrifocality and customary fields of power. Second, it bridges across to critical refugee theory and anthropology of development to question the Orientalist scrutiny of a neocolonial gaze which often seeks to safeguard the emancipation of Sahrāwī women in the modern period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER] |
