In Celebration of Black History Month, Anansesem: Telling Stories and Storytelling African Maternal Pedagogies, by Adwoa Ntozake Onuora (March 2015) is 40% off using coupon code MOTHERS (offer ends February, 29, 2016).
For full information on book, including the table of contents, please see the following link:
http://demeterpress.org/books/anansesem-telling-stories-and-storytelling-african-maternal-pedagogies/
Please share! Thank you for your support of our non-profit feminist press and this important issue.
Anansesem: Telling Stories and Storytelling African Maternal Pedagogies is a composite story on African-Canadian mothers’ experiences of teaching and learning while mothering. It seeks to celebrate the African mother’s everyday experiences and honour her embodied and cultural knowledges as important sites of meaning making and discovery for the African child. Through the Afro-indigenous art of Anancy storytelling, memoir, creative non-fiction and illustrations, the author takes you on an evocative narrative journey that focuses on how African descended women draw upon and are central to African childrens’ cultural, social and identity development. In entering these stories, readers access their joys, sadness, strengths and weaknesses as they mother in the midst of marginalization. The book is a testament to the power of counter-storytelling for inspiring internal and external transformation.
“Hallelujah! Finally! One of our “babies” has used the language and the euro-cen-tric dominated system of the academy to document, re-validate, and reassure Afri-can descendant parents in Canada, about the “rightness” of our parenting! Anansesem reiterates what sister/sistah/granny/aunty/uncle/father/brother/ community Mothers of African-descendant children have been “doing”: it extrapolates the “knowing and doing” of our ancestors-free or oppressed, who used art forms as “cultural instruction” for thriving. Onuora is undoubtedly a product of “cultural genetics”: she knows, genetically and culturally! Everyone who believes in the equality of all peoples must read this. Anansesem is unequivocal about the essentiality of using cultural forms in the making of a person. She is right-our children’s “thrive barometer” is elevated by strategies that build “cultural, social and identity consciousness”: their “African Selfhood”; their “Being”. Peaceful Resistance! Survival! Possibility!”
-Joan Grant Cummings, parent, Black feminist activist, 2015
“Readers put your hands together for Adwoa Onuora’s book which shines the spotlight on those Knowledge Creators who are seldom in the light: Mothers, Afro-origin mothers; the Village it takes to raise a child; Storytellers and Artists. Adwoa’s book is Soul-affirming and Fun.”
-Rita Shelton Deverell, theatre artist, media producer, co-founder of Vision TV, and Adjunct Professor of Women’s Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University
Adwoa Ntozake Onuora is a Lecturer at The University of The West Indies, Mona in Kingston, Jamaica.
