Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
INTRODUCTION
Social struggles over conceptions and definitions of moral womanhood - of what it means in any time or place to be a 'proper' woman - often develop in dialectical relationship to other social and political movements and institutions. Thus, discourses about women's rights and emancipation in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Middle East and elsewhere in the Islamic world were both enabled and circumscribed by the anti-colonial, nationalist movements for independence of which they were a crucial part. Both movements - nationalism and women's emancipation - were characterized by their will to be modern while 'preserving' their notions of cultural authenticity and authentic morality, and by their goal of ending Western colonial rule while emulating aspects of liberal Western philosophies and institutions.1 Although it has been well established that nationalist victories rarely gave feminists what they had hoped and struggled for, it was not until the deep failure of the nationalist projects and their displacement by other social and political movements such as the Islamist ones that new conceptions of moral womanhood have increasingly become normative.
Somalia is no exception to these developments. However, there are several reasons why the Somali case is of particular interest. First, in few countries was the popular discourse about nationalism and nationalist moral womanhood as articulate and lively as in the Somalia of the 1960s-1980s. Second, in few countries was the failure of the nationalist project as absolute as in the Somalia of the early 1990s, when state and social order themselves collapsed in communal (clan-based) violence that took many Somalis completely by surprise. This cataclysm, which had been in the making for over a decade2 and gave rise to diasporic communities of Somalis throughout the world, has transformed (and is transforming) the discourses about Somali communal identities and moral womanhood, as well as discursive sites in which these are debated and propagated. The genre of Somali popular culture that is central to this essay is increasingly produced outside of Somalia and reaches Somalis, wherever they are, through the electronic media.
The Somali popular songs analyzed here3 were part of the nationalist project of 'modernity' of the Somali nationalist movement and independent state from 1955 to 1991. After a...