Past Event

Don’t miss our last Brownbag Seminar! Mary Owusu from the History Department here at Carleton University will be speaking on

Topic: Women as Intellectuals: Nation-building, Knowledge-making, and the Writing of History
Date: April 6, 2022 | 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm (EDT)
Moderator: Dr. Shireen Hassim, Canada 150 Research Chair in Gender and African Politics.

Abstract

This talk expands upon the nation-building accounts of nationalist historiography. It highlights female intellectuals, who, though exist through the 1930s to 1960s, have been erased from dominant accounts about Ghanaian intellectual history and the project of nation-building. One reason for the silence of dominant scholarship and nationalist narratives on female intellectuals is that the females, unlike their male counterparts, did not write great books. Another reason is the focus of nationalist historiography on the male writer-intellectuals who led protests and anti-colonial movements. While politics did shape intellectual life in Ghana, it is no reason to think this reading of intellectuals must be permanent. Nationalist histories that include women exist. The problem is that such histories focus on an unvariegated anti-colonial women’s movement that broadly feature market women and grassroots politicians most of whom are presented as either unlettered or barely schooled. This talk explores how to situate the writings and works of female intellectuals who pondered over the problems of Ghana contextually, and contemporaneously.

About

Mary Owusu teaches African history at Carleton. Her research interests lie in the areas of African intellectual, political and development histories. Owusu’s research uses a pedagogical lens to explore Ghanaian and West African history. Her methodological approach challenges dominant frameworks in the writing of history and how that impacts processes of memory making and meaning making. Owusu is passionate about writing critical transnational histories that paint a more textured picture by giving voice to marginalized events and personalities.