Engaging with tradition -- Speaking out: young women on sexuality -- Challenging the institution of marriage -- Focusing on survival: women's health issues -- Taking a stand: women as activists against war, environmental degradation, and social conflict -- Writing from a different place: perspectives on exile and diaspora -- Standing at the edge of time: African women's visions of the past, present, and future

This work is a transnational anthology that focuses on women's strategies of resistance to the challenges they face in Africa today. The anthology brings together personal narratives, testimony, interviews, short stories, poetry, performance scripts, folktales, and lyrics. Thematically organized, it presents women's writing on such issues as intertribal and interethnic conflicts, the degradation of the environment, polygamy, domestic abuse, the controversial traditional practice of female genital cutting, Sharia law, intergenerational tensions, and emigration and exile. Contributors include internationally recognized authors and activists such as Wangari Maathai and Nawal El Saadawi, as well as a host of new voices from all over the African continent and from the African diaspora. Interdisciplinary in scope, this collection provides an introduction to contemporary African women's literature and highlights social issues that are particular to Africa but are also of worldwide concern