Enlightenment, Modernity and Radical Cosmopolitanism in Autobiographies by Two Somali Women

Abstract

Abstract: This article on the autobiographies by two Somali feminist activists, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Waris Dirie, argues that the experience of some post-colonial Muslim women in western diaspora redefines women's autobiography, modernity, Muslim femininity and feminist critique in surprising new ways. Informed by theories of women's and post-colonial autobiography, alternative modernities and cosmopolitanism, this study proposes that for some African Muslim women who have never been modern, Enlightenment notions of selfhood might be at least as useful as postmodernity and feminism, offering them a crucial opportunity to reconstruct themselves as free, rational and autonomous subjects after their emigration to the western world. It is further argued that these authors redefine the Enlightenment understanding of selfhood in line with feminism and postmodernism, proposing a new vision of the female subject of the developing world rising towards modernity that has been denied to her, through engagement with the ideas of the free, rational subject as well as the irrational and libidinal. The authors' gestures of reaching for the foreign narratives of the west are associated with radical cosmopolitanism, in opposition to their culture, which refuses to accept otherness.

Keywords:

• women's autobiography
• post-colonial autobiography
• Muslim feminism
• modernity
• the Enlightenment
• cosmopolitanism