YouSaid · the spoken record

Minna Salami

lines on the record: 26
first: 2025-02-10
most recent: 2025-02-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“You've been so great and really helped me to unpack the themes in the book. And I'm very honored and grateful for what you just said as well. And I'm super happy that the book has been useful and a pleasure for you. There's a notion from Nigeria called Shakara. And it means something like insouciance or defiance, boldness. There's a kind of erotic power to it. It's a word that I want to bring into this conversation because it really speaks to something that I think African feminism offers the world at large and offers women especially. And it's this kind of bold playfulness, a kind of intellectual arrogance that I mentioned earlier and even arrogance just generally because, you know, of course, this is a negative term as such. But, you know, in some sense, if we're going to”
2025-02-10 · Intelligence Squared · Can Feminism Be African? With Minna Salami · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This wonderful intervention because it's a concept about coming into the becoming of oneself and the being of oneself as well. And within that are all these complex layers of individuality, but also of a kind of interconnectedness and synergy with one's environment. And so individuation in that sense is feels so rich. But then I also found it so interesting that the discussions are indeed Nigerian but even more specifically in this section about the Yoruba. And I found that there are so many parallels between Jung's individuation and the Yoruba philosophy of life in a sense. And so I'm connecting those two to show that in an African context, we already have This language that points in the direction of individuation.”
2025-02-10 · Intelligence Squared · Can Feminism Be African? With Minna Salami · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So in this section on being I'm really trying to get us thinking deeper about the notion of being in itself but also really grappling with the contention that exists between the individual and her community because so much of the sense of being in an African context really is like that discussion of individualism versus communitarianism informs it so vastly and it's such a reductive conversation you know it's it's it's one”
2025-02-10 · Intelligence Squared · Can Feminism Be African? With Minna Salami · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tough cookie, and she always spoke back against the law enforcement. And, you know, she just has the spirit of the kind of feminist, the feminist killjoy. So yeah, so I found it generative to try to juxtapose these two sentiments ultimately to show that they both are of great value to the African feminist movement. I mean, maybe there's a slightly bold and risky attempt that I'm trying to do here by creating a binary and I say in the book that because I'm a non-dualist, I'm opposing binaries, but nevertheless in this case with like evoking a similar Martin Luther King Malcolm X juxtaposition because I think that that juxtaposition has been quite generative for black people around the world.”
2025-02-10 · Intelligence Squared · Can Feminism Be African? With Minna Salami · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This image of she's called Mama Africa. And of course this motherly kind of vision of her evokes feelings of harmony, of nurturing and peace. But actually she was a very rebellious woman in many ways. She married five times and so on, which is great for a woman of that time. It's very radical. But she was, there was something quite harmonious and gentle about her demeanor. And then on the other hand, we have Winnie Mandela, who in some sense was not as quote-unquote feminist. I mean, neither of them explicitly call themselves feminist, but, you know, insofar that she very happily played the role of Nelson of being the wife of Nelson Mandela for a very long time until she then quite famously didn't when she was just the wife. Even then she was, you know.”
2025-02-10 · Intelligence Squared · Can Feminism Be African? With Minna Salami · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. Yes, so I just want to say that with this notion of harmony, that it's not so much that I'm interested, like I'm not sort of saying that that's what we should go with. So I'm not advocating for harmony feminism in the book. As much as I'm trying to produce a level of tolerance for it and help us to understand where it's coming from, like harmony being something that Africans have been craving for really understandable reasons. You know, there's been so much disharmony forced upon the continent. I just want to acknowledge that what we might call harmony feminism exists and it has a potential as well. And so then I suggest that Miriam Makeba is a harmony feminist. And I'm speaking of Miriam Makeba and winning Mandela as icons and kind of what they represent. You know, Miriam Makeba has”
2025-02-10 · Intelligence Squared · Can Feminism Be African? With Minna Salami · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This spirit of non conformity and anger toward the injustice that women face within me. And once I started to articulate my feminism, More and more there was just such a clair tension between that and the kind of mainstream version of African identity which had been defined from the thresholds of male experience which in the book I referred to as Andro-Africanism these are the kinds of tensions that I think are really important to have space. I mean I'm writing about my experiences and of course because I'm mixed race, my mother is from Finland, one could say that I'm also influenced by the kind of quote unquote white feminism but I think it's more the kind of the element, the spirit of non-conformity that I'm seeking to conjure and hopefully inspire African women to think about.”
2025-02-10 · Intelligence Squared · Can Feminism Be African? With Minna Salami · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was and is so much shaped from the thresholds of male experience. And as a young woman, as a girl, and then as a young woman and later as an older woman, I mean because of this kind of atmosphere, I was very proud to be African and also because of what I spoke about earlier, Africa being this very symbolic or kind of word, you know, a notion. And I really embodied that, I carried that with me. My family, when my mother and I moved to Sweden when I was a teenager, I was devastated. I had a lot of friends who were moving and they were very happy because they were going to America or London or wherever. But I was really sad about this. So I was a very proud African child. And yet, because I was also a feminist and to some extent I believe that I was born a feminist. I just always had”
2025-02-10 · Intelligence Squared · Can Feminism Be African? With Minna Salami · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things were tough, but there was still this spirit of political and social possibility. And I was really attuned to that, partly also because, I mean, I think generally these discussions featured everywhere, but my parents also were friends with a lot of journalists and activists and politicians. There were these conversations where we're always around. And it was the spirit of pan-Africanism and rebellion. And these conversations were being shaped, of course, by key thinkers, Kwameung Krumah, Fela Kuti, Chino Achebe, Wale Shoyinka mentioned already, all of course men. And so the conversation around African identity was”
2025-02-10 · Intelligence Squared · Can Feminism Be African? With Minna Salami · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I mean, I see why you're being mindful because it's also a difficult question. So maybe the first thing I'll say is that, you know, we actually, I think as women all encounter this regardless of where we're from, you know, because there's just this inherent tension with womanhood and nationhood and identity, if you like. But maybe it takes a certain shape in Africa and it's definitely a pronounced one. And yes, I mean, for me, you know, I grew up in Lagos, in Nigeria, and I grew up in a time in the 1980s when we were, or the sort of the first generation of post-independence Nigerians had come of age because Nigeria gained independence in 1960. And so there was really this very progressive spirit. You know, things were tough for sure.”
2025-02-10 · Intelligence Squared · Can Feminism Be African? With Minna Salami · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so in order to disrupt that way of thinking, I am offering this trickster dualism, which is the observer and the observed. And that is why this particular scene in the movie is so fitting because, well, I'll let people read the book, but in a sense, the observer and the observed sound like they are a dualism, but they're actually not. And so that helps us to think about changing the relationships between whatever dualism we're looking at that is laden with a power dynamic that's harmful.”
2025-02-10 · Intelligence Squared · Can Feminism Be African? With Minna Salami · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. I don't actually think that it is a problem that that scene or that you. In this chapter The Trickster Dualism, I should preface just by saying that I perceive myself to be a non-dualist feminist, one of my big irks about the dominant conventional ways of knowing is dualism. I'm pursuing a non-dualist kind of mission in this chapter and in this book and in my work at large. The reason that I'm arguing that we need a kind of trickster dualism is because we are so programmed to thinking in dualistic ways and one of the key dualisms of our society historically and contemporarily is the dualism of the self and the other. You know, this is the dualism that we find in all kind of hierarchies, whether it's women and men and science versus emotions, Africa, Europe. There's always this dualistic way of thinking and embedded in that is a power hierarchy.”
2025-02-10 · Intelligence Squared · Can Feminism Be African? With Minna Salami · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thinking process behind superiorism. And I call it, this is the term that I use throughout the book rather than racism and so on. You know, I think that this is something that the world at large can really have a use of as we're trying to come to grip with so many of the urgent issues that we're facing.”
2025-02-10 · Intelligence Squared · Can Feminism Be African? With Minna Salami · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Its narrative is one that is what I call superiorist. And so when Europe then later encounters Africa and pursues it in this empirical way as a place to extract from and to exploit both resources and people and so on, I want readers to understand how that happens because the better we understand it, the better we can come to understand ourselves and the kind of challenges that we're facing. I call it superiorism and I find it useful to kind of place at the center the thing that is happening in oppression in whether it is racism or patriarchy, sexism, classism, to just really center the act and what it is is that there is one group that is saying that we are superior to another group, a kind of unpack how this comes to like what is the”
2025-02-10 · Intelligence Squared · Can Feminism Be African? With Minna Salami · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's perfect that you frame it that way, actually, because so much of this section is probing even more deeply into what incentuous knowledge I coined as Euro-patriarchal knowledge. And so it is precisely this combination of neocolonialism or Eurocentrism, if you like, and patriarchy. And that really necessarily sets a foundation for the spatiality in which African women find ourselves in today. And African men too, of course. You know, I start way back historically speaking, looking at the invention of Africa, but also the invention of Europe, because I believe that, or as I show in the book, that that framing and that arising of what we know as Europe”
2025-02-10 · Intelligence Squared · Can Feminism Be African? With Minna Salami · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because people might say, What has this got to do with feminism? And one of the things that I'm always pointing out in the book I want to mention here too is that, you know, African feminism is per definition a political philosophy that is looking at gender-raised ethnicity. So it's intersectional in that sense. The word African in that phrase plays a big role. We have to also unpack and reconstruct the notion of Africanness to be able to fit into it as women.”
2025-02-10 · Intelligence Squared · Can Feminism Be African? With Minna Salami · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With meanings that are all about the history of Africa, the greed, the violence, but also the kind of ancestral legacies, you know, for some people it's all about the people of Africa and what they look like, their phenotype, their genotype, also their, you know, their traits, their character. There's so many layers. I mean, I say in the book that Africa is almost as symbolical as the cross. It's got so many meanings to it. And yet in some sense all of these things are pointing toward a way that we very reductively think about Africa always in these very empirical terms.”
2025-02-10 · Intelligence Squared · Can Feminism Be African? With Minna Salami · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Says that Africa is a European invention, and I guess I start from a place of agreement with him and probably to some extent also end there. So I just want to make that clear before I try to unpack then the notion of Africa is one that is so incredibly rife with symbolism and meaning and contention in ways that other continents are not. You know, we see Africa on necklaces, as tattoos, as photos, like when you just hear that word and it conjures a whole host of images and symbols and meanings. And many of those are sort of biophysical. So people just think of the actual sort of geography of Africa. It's layered.”
2025-02-10 · Intelligence Squared · Can Feminism Be African? With Minna Salami · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do this work, but what else is feminism other than precisely that? And that is where language comes in because as members of the human species, you know, this is the tool that we have available to us above all tools with which we employ our imaginative faculties and are able to redream new possibilities. But I do, as I already in the book's Dedication, say that language in itself has a limitation it's not the kind of end destination. It's more of a conduit taking us toward that place of freedom and flourishing and liberation. And the book is sectioned into three. The first section is about Africa. The second is about feminism. And the third is about being. Which is also a word in the title question. And the aim in each of these sections is to use language to reimagine and to reinvent each of these three huge concepts in a sense.”
2025-02-10 · Intelligence Squared · Can Feminism Be African? With Minna Salami · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, the first thing that comes to mind in response to what you just said was that even though this book is sort of looking at a different theme than my previous book, Censuous Knowledge, it is in some way a sequel to sensuous knowledge. And many of the conversations and reflections that have come up for me in the four years and sensuous knowledge was published are themes that I further explore in this book. And one of those is precisely this thing about reimagining and in some sense reinventing the world. And in the book I speak about the kind of intellectual arrogance in some sense that is required for feminists to do this work of reimagining the world because it isn't quite arrogant to say that, well, I want to reimagine the world.”
2025-02-10 · Intelligence Squared · Can Feminism Be African? With Minna Salami · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Driven by the argument that feminism is unafrican. And this argument takes shape in multiple ways, right? But to the extent that that backlash, I think, or that that sentiment informs this disturbing backlash that is very much still ongoing and even, I would say, stronger than ever, the question is challenging that. And wanting in some regard to engage with that. So saying, can feminism be African, you know, because everybody, all these people seem to be saying that it can't. So let's engage with the question. The last reason that I'll mention for the title question is precisely because it is so contradictory and paradoxical and I believe that paradox is a very generative impulse. It's something that stops us in our tracks and makes us think. And so I really wanted to invite that kind of spirit into this inquiry.”
2025-02-10 · Intelligence Squared · Can Feminism Be African? With Minna Salami · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Writing a blog about African feminism for 15 years. I launched this blog in 2010. It's called Misapropolitan. And over those years, I have come to understand that the backlash against African feminism is not only massive. There's a huge backlash against feminism in Africa, in the”
2025-02-10 · Intelligence Squared · Can Feminism Be African? With Minna Salami · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“African feminist perspectives from the continent particularly but also from its diaspora. And so in some sense when I'm asking the question, can feminism be African? I'm asking, can feminism be African already? Like can we also include the African feminist perspective in this very important and wonderful conversation that is happening right now within the feminist space? And then Secondly, I'm asking the question precisely where you are going with that there's a kind of confrontational spirit almost there and saying like why how can you even ask this question to some people to some people it's like why would you want to create a distinction between feminism and Africa and to others it might be you know obviously there is no immediate automatic relationship between the two terms and I've been”
2025-02-10 · Intelligence Squared · Can Feminism Be African? With Minna Salami · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Years or so, there's been an explosion of feminist literature compared at least to previous eras. There could always be room for more, but there's been a lot of feminist literature, non-fiction, and fiction has been published. And a lot of this literature has taken an intersectional approach, which is fantastic, an intersectional approach being that these books are interpreting feminism and womanhood and gender related issues with an awareness and a cognizance that womanhood is shaped not only by gender but also by class, by race, ethnicity, sexuality, ability, and so on. And yet, amidst this kind of unprecedented interest and engagement with feminist literature, there is an absence of African feminist voices.”
2025-02-10 · Intelligence Squared · Can Feminism Be African? With Minna Salami · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A few contentions around the notion of African feminism, contentions, provocations, tensions, paradoxes, things like that. But really, if I were to try to narrow down in a concrete way why I chose this title for the book and I want to emphasize the word concrete because of course in some sense titles are magical entities that just sometimes just appear of their own accord and we go with it and then sort of explore the title which also happened with this book to some extent but the concrete reasons that I can kind of give a rational answer a linear answer to there are three reasons the first reason that I chose this title is because I would argue that feminism is having kind of a moment in the past 10 years”
2025-02-10 · Intelligence Squared · Can Feminism Be African? With Minna Salami · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely, thank you very much for that question. The subtitle of the book, which one cannot see on the proof, I also still just have the proofs with me, is a most paradoxical question. Can feminism be African? A most paradoxical question? And the reason that the book is titled this is precisely because it is a multi-layered polyphonic question. There's something obviously provocative about it and you know it's been quite fascinating since the book was announced and since I've been sharing the cover on social media you know it seems to conjure very different reactions in people in some sense the aim of posing a question like this in a book's title is to provoke thought and to get a discussion going because there are quite”
2025-02-10 · Intelligence Squared · Can Feminism Be African? With Minna Salami · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT