“Through vivid stories of individual innovation and strategies of survival, Twagira offers a new perspective on twentieth-century biopolitics in Mali. Embodied Engineering adds important critical nuance to understandings of environmental crisis, cultural value, and gendered knowledge production in West Africa.”
Emily S. Burrill, author of States of Marriage: Gender, Justice, and Rights in Colonial Mali
“By focusing on gender ideology, food technologies, and development initiatives, Twagira encourages readers to consider the “lived material bodies” of women in twentieth-century rural Mali…. Summing up: Recommended.”
Choice 59, no. 10 (June 2022)
“A fantastic contribution to multiple fields of study, both within and beyond the academy. Twagira fulfills her stated objectives, particularly that of addressing the prevalent assumptions of African women as without access to technology and static in their work. Her research shows the immense agency and importance of Malian women in their capacity to cultivate embodied relationships with the natural world through the cultivation, collection, and cooking of food.”
Inigo Acosta, H-Sci-Med-Tech / H-Net Reviews
Foregrounding African women’s ingenuity and labor, this pioneering case study shows how women in rural Mali have used technology to ensure food security through the colonial period, environmental crises, and postcolonial rule.
By advocating for an understanding of rural Malian women as engineers, Laura Ann Twagira rejects the persistent image of African women as subjects without technological knowledge or access and instead reveals a hidden history about gender, development, and improvisation. In so doing, she also significantly expands the scope of African science and technology studies.
Using the Office du Niger agricultural project as a case study, Twagira argues that women used modest technologies (such as a mortar and pestle or metal pots) and organized female labor to create, maintain, and reengineer a complex and highly adaptive food production system. While women often incorporated labor-saving technologies into their work routines, they did not view their own physical labor as the problem it is so often framed to be in development narratives. Rather, women’s embodied techniques and knowledge were central to their ability to transform a development project centered on export production into an environmental resource that addressed local taste and consumption needs.
Laura Ann Twagira is an associate professor of history at Wesleyan University. She edited the “Africanizing Technology” special issue for the journal Technology and Culture and was a scholar in residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City. More info →
Excerpt: Introduction
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Age of Concrete
Housing and the Shape of Aspiration in the Capital of Mozambique
By David Morton
Age of Concrete is about people building homes on tenuous ground in the outer neighborhoods of Maputo, Mozambique, places thought of simply as slums. But up close, they are an archive: houses of reeds, wood, zinc, and concrete embodying the ambitions of people who built their own largest investment and greatest bequest to the future.
Architecture | Urban & Land Use Planning · Social History · Human Geography · Mozambique · African Studies
States of Marriage
Gender, Justice, and Rights in Colonial Mali
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Gender Studies · African History · History · Mali · African Studies
Powerful Frequencies
Radio, State Power, and the Cold War in Angola, 1931–2002
By Marissa J. Moorman
Radio technology and broadcasting played a central role in the formation of colonial Portuguese Southern Africa and the postcolonial nation-state, Angola. Moorman details how settlers, the colonial state, African nationalists, and the postcolonial state all used radio to project power, while the latter employed it to challenge empire.
African History · Technology & Engineering | Telecommunications · Media Studies · Angola · African Studies
Women’s Perspectives on Human Security
Violence, Environment, and Sustainability
Edited by Richard Matthew, Patricia A. Weitsman, Gunhild Hoogensen Gjørv, Nora Davis, and Tera Dornfeld
This multidisciplinary collection examines women’s security threats stemming from conflict, environmental policy, and economic limitations, as well as the growing repertoire of grass-roots solutions women are creating, demanding, and sharing throughout the world to increase their security.
Political Science | Security (National & International) · Women’s Studies · Human Rights
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