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SPEAKER:
*Jeanne Penvenne*
Professor of History Faculty International Relations & Africana Studies, Tufts University: jeanne.penvenne@tufts.edu
Biography
Social and labor historian. Her work focuses on the urban African population of colonial era Mozambique. Her first books, Trabalhadores de Lourenço Marques and African Workers and Colonial Racism, considered the largely male labor force from the turn of the twentieth century to the political insurrection of the 1960s. This book led her to the third book, Women, Migration and the Cashew Economy of Southern Mozambique, 1945-1974, which focus labor, gender, migration in the southern Mozambique. Aside from teaching in the History, International Relations, Africana and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies programs at Tufts, Jeanne Penvenne also taught and helped to develop curricula in African Historiography, Gender and Oral History at Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, Maputo - Mozambique.
***Session I – 11 May 2017 – 18h-20h***
Seeking Gendered Perspectives – Matimu & I Khale
"This focuses on the growing consensus that women’s perspectives and positions need to be re-centered and re-assessed in historical, development, political, economic literature. I have worked up a multi-lecture unit for the UEM graduate program on Gender History and Oralcy, but here would only draw out key points for the history / gender studies people. Here, Jan Bender Shetler’s point is essential:
…women possessed not just another version but wholly different kinds of knowledge about the past…men and women share neither styles of oral narration nor types of knowledge about the past. Men and women occupy separate spheres in their daily routines, sharing the same world but participating in different, though intersecting, sets of discourses about that world… A gendered analysis of oral tradition is necessary for finding its historical meaning.”
[Jan Bender Shetler, Imagining Serengeti: A History of Landscape Memory in Tanzania from Earliest Times to the Present (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007): 11-12.]
***Session II – 12 May 2017 – 18h-20h***
"The Order in Disorder – The Problem with Seeing Like State
This focuses on urban Africa, especially the peri-urban areas where the majority populations reside. Taking colonial Lourenço Marques as its case study, it argues that by focusing on the licensed, measured, taxed, tidied bits of the large and vibrant economy, we miss what the majority population does, and we treat their activity as residual or we include it in negative placement: in-formal, il-legal, un-licensed, un-taxed. We need to center the quotidien economy and deal with it on its own terms, even if that means developing new discourses. We also need to focus on children’s labor on the world’s youngest continent."
***Session III – 13 May 2017 – 10h-12h***
The Challenges of Writing Women, Migration and the Cashew Economy of Southern Mozambique, 1945- 1975.
"Between the late 1940s and Independence in 1875, rural Mozambican women migrated to the capital, Lourenço Marques, to find employment in the cashew shelling industry. This lecture will focus on the labour and social history of what became the country’s most important late colonial era industry through the oral history and songs of three generations of the workforce in Jiva Jamal Tharani’s company in Chamanculo. The rich narratives convey layered histories: the rural crises that triggered the flight of women, their lives as factory workers, widespread payment and wage fraud, the formation of innovative urban families, and the health costs that all African families paide for municipal neglect of their neighborhoods."
[Adapted from the book: Penvenne, Jeanne Marie (2015) The Challenges of Writing Women, Migration and the Cashew Economy of Southern Mozambique, 1945- 1975. USA: James Currey]