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"My Most Beautiful Ornament Is My House": National Womanhood and Urban Modernity in Late Colonial and Postcolonial Senegal, 1956-1968
This article examines changing representations of women and the city during the years surrounding Senegal's 1960 independence from France. By focusing on advertisements, images, and texts of the largest (and later only) political party's newspaper, this article shows how women and their bodies were politicized by a nation-building process that relied on discourses of the "modern" city and the "traditional" countryside. In the late colonial period and immediately following independence, nationalists perceived a planned city of modern residents as foundational to the emerging nation. Imagery and textual references to women's consumption and to their labor portrayed them as important participants in the construction of urban spaces and the development of modern citizens. However, as Senegal's industrialized urban future became increasingly uncertain, text and imagery valorized rural Senegal and traditional bodies, adornment, and female sexuality. Their urbanized inverses were reinscribed as a potential threat to the national project.
"My Most Beautiful Ornament Is My House": National Womanhood and Urban Modernity in Late Colonial and Postcolonial Senegal, 1956-1968
This article examines changing representations of women and the city during the years surrounding Senegal's 1960 independence from France. By focusing on advertisements, images, and texts of the largest (and later only) political party's newspaper, this article shows how women and their bodies were politicized by a nation-building process that relied on discourses of the "modern" city and the "traditional" countryside. In the late colonial period and immediately following independence, nationalists perceived a planned city of modern residents as foundational to the emerging nation. Imagery and textual references to women's consumption and to their labor portrayed them as important participants in the construction of urban spaces and the development of modern citizens. However, as Senegal's industrialized urban future became increasingly uncertain, text and imagery valorized rural Senegal and traditional bodies, adornment, and female sexuality. Their urbanized inverses were reinscribed as a potential threat to the national project.
"My Most Beautiful Ornament Is My House": National Womanhood and Urban Modernity in Late Colonial and Postcolonial Senegal, 1956-1968
Fretwell, E. A (author)
2016
Article (Journal)
English
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