Gendered Spaces and Defiant Voices

This book explores musical and personal experiences
of three Sudanese women performers and analyzes
textual meanings of a particular type of women s
songs in Sudan called aghani al-banaat. Because
there are many discourses about womanhood ,
culture, and gender in Sudan, aghani al-banaat could
stand as another narrative for negotiating
gender/power relations and identity formation by the
Sudanese women. Despite being labeled as loose
and bad singing, aghani al-baanat provided a
discursive space through which the Sudanese women
voiced their alternative narratives of social and
gender relations. It offered both a framework of
negotiating the existing relations as well as a
dream of improvement.The book concludes that
Sudanese women, especially the pioneering performers
of ex-slave descendent origin, created their own
culture and popular literature in which they
contextualize the past, the present, and the future
of their varied realities and fantasies.

Autorentext

Dr. Saadia Malik is an Assistant Professor and Head of the Department of Mass Communication at Qatar University, Qatar. She previously taught at Kansas University in the USA. She earned Ph.D. in Mass Communication from Ohio University, and two Masters from Ohio University and the Institute of Social Studies, the Netherlands.

Klappentext

This book explores musical and personal experiences of three Sudanese women performers and analyzes textual meanings of a particular type of women's songs in Sudan called "aghani al-banaat." Because there are many discourses about "womanhood", culture, and gender in Sudan, aghani al-banaat could stand as another narrative for negotiating gender/power relations and identity formation by the Sudanese women. Despite being labeled as "loose" and "bad" singing, aghani al-baanat provided a discursive space through which the Sudanese women voiced their alternative narratives of social and gender relations. It offered both a framework of negotiating the existing relations as well as a dream of improvement.The book concludes that Sudanese women, especially the pioneering performers of ex-slave descendent origin, created their own culture and popular literature in which they contextualize the past, the present, and the future of their varied realities and fantasies.