Malik, S: Gendered Spaces and Defiant Voices

This book explores musical and personal experiences of three Sudanese women performers and analyzes textual meanings of a particular type of women s songs in Sudan called aghani al-banaat. Because there are many discourses about womanhood , culture, and gender in Sudan, aghani al-banaat could stand as another narrative for negotiating gender/power relations and identity formation by the Sudanese women. Despite being labeled as loose and bad singing, aghani al-baanat provided a discursive space through which the Sudanese women voiced their alternative narratives of social and gender relations. It offered both a framework of negotiating the existing relations as well as a dream of improvement.The book concludes that Sudanese women, especially the pioneering performers of ex-slave descendent origin, created their own culture and popular literature in which they contextualize the past, the present, and the future of their varied realities and fantasies.