Beyond colonial politics of identity: being and becoming female youth in colonial Kenya

Elizabeth Ngutuku and Auma Okwany

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: This paper draws on biographical research among the Akamba and the Luo communities in Eastern and Western Kenya, respectively. Our research explored how practices of adolescence as a process, an institution, and a performance of identity interact with colonial modernities and imaginaries in complex ways. The biographical research was carried out predominantly with women born in the late colonial period in Kenya. We provide critical reflections on the process and affordances of our embodied storytelling approach, which we position as an Africanist methodology and a decolonial research practice. This research and approach provided women with a space to narrate and perform their lived experience, potentially disrupting epistemic inequities that are embedded in the way research on growing up in the past is carried out. The discussions show how colonialism interacted with other factors, including gender and generational power, tradition, girls’ agency, and other life characteristics like poverty and family situation, in order to influence the lived experiences of women. Going beyond the narratives of victimhood that characterise coming of age in similar spaces, we present women’s emergent, incomplete, and incongruent agency. We position this agency as the diverse ways in which people come to terms with their difficult contexts. The discussion also points to the need for unsettling the settled thinking about girlhood and coming of age in specific historical spaces in the global South.

Keywords: becoming; identity; colonial girlhood; storytelling; ubuntu; coming of age (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2024-06-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-hme
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Genealogy, 1, June, 2024, 8(2). ISSN: 2313-5778

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/123520/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:123520

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().