What are the challenges facing Africanist and African women's and gender studies scholars?

What are the challenges facing Africanist and African women's and gender studies scholars? Gabeba Baderoon (bio), Maha Marouan (bio), and Alicia Decker (bio) End Page 107 Editors of Pandemonium spoke with Gabeba Baderoon, Maha Marouan, and Alicia Decker on August 4 and 28, 2023. Alicia Decker: Out of our shared challenges came the idea to create an alternative space to engage in critical conversations and scholarly work on feminist issues in Africa and the African diaspora—dynamics that are not equitable all the time. The African Feminist Initiative (AFI) is a transnational virtual community that my colleague Gabeba Baderoon and I started at Penn State in 2015. Gabeba and I came together to create a space to think critically about African feminisms, a truly global transnational collective that is actively engaged in all levels of feminist activism, dialogue, and research both within and outside the academy. In 2018, Maha joined us as our third codirector, so the three of us function as equals … as a triumvirate. As of 2023, AFI has over five hundred members, many from Africa, but also from Europe, South America, Asia, and North America. We have held six international conferences and workshops and have become a hub for virtual transnational feminist movement across different kinds of borders. AFI serves as an example of a feminist community that's growing in the midst of backlash. Transnational feminisms are obviously not new, but it does seem like it is a space that is continuing to grow and thrive, consisting of actively politicized communities addressing some of the challenges the discipline is facing and ensuring there is space for conversations that are more challenging in certain institutional and national settings. Gabeba Baderoon: I'm a South African, so a lot of my work tends to be on South Africa. I have strong connections with the universities there. Austerity has been the reality there, and in the U.S., of course, too. I'm so grateful to have this as my job. So how does something like women's and gender studies in Africa flourish? The story is sometimes a little surprising: sometimes outside of the classroom. But there are also positive developments to report on what is happening inside the classroom and inside the university. For instance, the development of the Department of Feminist Studies at the End Page 108 University of Cape Town is just a magnificent arrival of something that has been in discussion among many of us for a long time, since the late 1990s. Maha Marouan: I grew up in Morocco, that's my home, but I work at a U.S. institution, so when I do work in the continent, I am challenged differently. Some of the challenges for me are: How do you form feminist solidarities transnationally? How do you challenge global hierarchies? How do you forge feminist linkages without undermining feminist politics of resistance as forged in the specificity of one's history and locale? I get a sense at times that I am caught between two worlds, but most of the time, I feel deeply enriched by my positionality. The work that we do through AFI is to continue to find linkages and learn from one another. We do that through our monthly feminist dialogues, we do it through transnational collaborative projects that reflect the complexity of our commitment and positionality but without privileging one particular mode of knowledge. This does not mean this is a smooth-sailing process. In fact, I am constantly faced with challenges. Identity politics play a part. For instance, Alicia's idea to work collaboratively with scholars from different parts of the continent to examine the state of women and gender studies in academia was an important initiative. But there was a lot of tension when all of us from different backgrounds and locales met. Because Alicia and I are academically situated in the Global North, we were perceived by many of our colleagues in the continent as reinforcing these global hierarchies by undertaking this project. My African belonging was also challenged. As a North African, I was perceived as "less authentically" African—despite the fact that I do not subscribe to the colonial division...