About

Ousseina Alidou is a faculty member specializing in women’s orality and literacy practices in African Muslim societies, African literature and folklore, and African and comparative women’s studies. She holds a B.A. from Université Abdou Moumouni in Niamey, as well as an M.A. and Ph.D. from Indiana University. Her academic work focuses on the cultural and literary expressions within African Muslim communities, emphasizing gender and societal dynamics. She is affiliated with the Program in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, where she contributes to research and teaching in her areas of expertise.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Geography
• Law
• Gender studies

Selected publications

• Gendered Scripts and Legacies in the Sahelian Space: Pre-Islamic, Islamic, and European Languages

  2025-04-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The cultural space of the West African Sahel is a crossroad of several gendered epistemologies based on different scripts and their overlap with orality. Three of these scripts, on which I intend to focus, are Tifinagh, Ajami, and the Roman/Latin alphabet. Tifinagh has been in existence since antiquity and is used predominantly among the Amazigh/Tuareg populations; Ajami, the Africanized Arabic script, is a product of the encounter with Islam that stretches back to the tenth century; and the Roman alphabet, of course, is part of the more recent nineteenth-century legacy of European colonial rule in West Africa. In this essay, I look at the interplay between these three scriptural traditions in terms of their evolution and the gender and class politics that have shaped different literacies and literary traditions in what is today the Republic of Niger. In the process, I shall also highlight how recent postcolonial forces of democratization have led to the rethinking of the role of Tifinagh and Ajami, in particular, in addressing social hierarchies in knowledge production and access resulting from the dominant position of the French language within the Francophone polity. This attempt to democratize the use of Ajami beyond the religious sphere by further desacralizing it and freeing it from the clerical monopoly in Hausa-speaking societies, for example, offers an insightful perspective into the divergent subjectivity of the inheritors of a common cultural heritage spread across former French and British colonies that represent the contemporary Niger Republic and Nigeria, respectively.

  PublisherDOI

• African Studies, Forging Common Grounds: Languages, Scripts and Translation

  African Studies Review · 2024-12-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract In this presidential address I offer a critical examination of how Africa was misrepresented in the Global North’s imaginations and media reporting during the COVID-19 pandemic. Such biased imaginings of Africa as a site of inevitable catastrophe account for the racialized under-accounting of the history of African scientists’ pioneering success in biomedical research and with epidemics. The global archives of COVID-19 pandemics must acknowledge these scientists, as well as the humanistic contributions of African artists who collaborated with health experts and produced poetic/musical performances in local and world languages to tackle biomedical and social pandemics.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Protest Arts, Gender, and Social Change

  University of Michigan Press eBooks · 2023-07-19 · 2 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Sub-Saharan Africa

  2022-01-18

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Since the 1990s the countries of the Sahel have been experimenting with democratic systems that have resulted in both political pluralism with a gendered dimension and a renewed place for Islam in the public sphere. This essay focuses on the emergence of Muslim women’s social reform movements advocating for women’s rights in the region. These movements manifest a diversity of trajectories and objectives. As I will argue, the quest by Muslim women activists for women’s rights and gender justice in accordance with new readings of Islam and state laws must be understood at the juncture of economic liberalization, democratic pluralism, and religious transformations and more recently the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The essay discusses cases of social changes resulting from Muslim women’s reform movements in education, public health, politics, the law, the arts, and the use of old and new media.

  PublisherDOI

• Muslim Women’s Social Movements in the Sahel

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2021-12-08

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Since the 1990s, the countries of the Sahel have been experimenting with democratic systems that have resulted in both political pluralism with a gendered dimension and a renewed place for Islam in the public sphere. This chapter focuses on the emergence of critical Muslim women’s social reform movements advocating for women’s rights in the region. These movements manifest a diversity of Islamic and secularist trajectories and objectives. Strikingly, however, the majority converges on a common quest for gender justice against cultural and state patriarchy. Furthermore, they also display a range of responses to external hegemonic forces—including neoliberalism, local and global violent Islamist extremisms, human trafficking, and ethno-regional tensions. Starting with the politico-economic context within which many of these critical social movements have arisen in recent times, this chapter uses specific social frames—education, family law, arts, and entrepreneurship—to examine their strategies and transformative impacts in the Sahel.

  PublisherDOI

• Women in Niger

  Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History · 2021-03-24 · 8 citations

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Nigerien women played important cultural, economic, and political leadership roles throughout history. Women across ethnicities contributed to the economic life in precolonial Nigerien societies and their public presence in indigenous markets have been recorded by both Arab chroniclers as well as European colonial explorers, authorities, and historians. Women also occupied important positions in the political sphere and played important roles within their indigenous religious traditions and pantheons. The advent of Islam in the region in the 11th century changed the nature of preexisting spaces. However, a syncretism between Islam and indigenous religions developed, and this created yet another space for women across Nigerien ethnic groups to continue the preservation of some practices tied to their indigenous culture. As predominantly Muslims, most Nigerien women and men have been exposed to Arabic and Qur’anic literacy, and women of clerical lineage and those married to Qur’anic teachers have played a major role in the propagation of Islamic literacy in Nigerien precolonial societies, and continue to do so in the postcolonial dispensation. Ethnic and regional diversity accounts for the degree of authority that women may enjoy within the family structure, and women from rural and urban areas experience patriarchal structures in distinct ways. In relation to contemporary participation in political leadership, the year 1991, with the historic women’s march, marked a turning point in the history of women’s political leadership. The democratization process opened the way for multiparty democracy and greater women’s participation; it also fostered a religious pluralism that has engendered manifestations with women playing distinctive roles in the religious moral economy, including in minority religions. However, democratic pluralism has inadvertently created the conditions for the growth of violent religious fundamentalist movements undermining the rights of girls and women. Unequal gendered and power relations continue to hinder Nigerien women’s emergence at high levels of public leadership, with consequences for economic development and women’s rights. While there has been a steady increase in women’s participation in parliament and high-level appointed positions in government owing to a quota law, which was revisited in 2019, Nigerien women still have some way to go to achieve representative parity not only in politics but also in other public and private sectors of employment and elective positions in society. In terms of human development, Niger continues to register poor development indicators, especially those relating to women’s and girls’ welfare and well-being in rural areas including high rates of child marriage as well as high infant mortality and maternal mortality rates. The status of women in Nigerien societies continues to experience major mutations as women consolidate their roles as a visible and vocal political force as well as one of the main drivers of economic development.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction: Current Perspectives on Islamic Family Law in Africa

  Islamic Africa · 2021 · 3 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Law

  Abstract This special issue of Islamic Africa brings together new critical perspectives on the status of Islamic Family Law, commonly referred to as sharīʿa , within four African countries – Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique and Senegal – each reflecting distinctive gendered cultural, colonial and postcolonial realities. The introduction provides a general overview of the state of the art on Islamic family law in Africa and highlights the significant thematic focus of each contribution and the new areas for further inquiry that the volume opens. These topics and questions include among others: (a) the ways in which European colonialism and contemporary democratization processes have opened spaces for religious pluralism, thereby shaping the articulation of Muslim personal law within different African postcolonial state judicial systems; (b) how Islamic judicial practices, institutions, and authorities such as malamai and/or Kadhis engage themselves with the secular state and/or are constrained by both the state and by the legal pluralism encountered within both Muslim majority and minority African countries; (c) the gendered implications of the hierarchical relation between Kadhi Courts and a national High Court; (d) the benefits and/or shortcomings of harmonizing Islamic Family Law; (e) what is to be learnt from women choosing to settle marital disputes and divorce within and/or outside the “legal protective space” afforded by the state judicial system and its inclusion of Islamic Family Law; (f) the role of human agency in influencing the administration of Islamic family law and/or interpreting the law; how judicial systems that are shaped by European and Islamic patriarchal systems confronted by the resilience of indigenous matrilineal Customary Law within contemporary African societies; and (g) the compatibility between the various articulation of African Islamic family laws with universal human rights and individual freedom. Ultimately, this special issue of Islamic Africa offers an insightful reflection on how Islamic Family Law plays an important role in democratic constitution-making or testing processes.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISMS AND WOMEN IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICA

  University of Wisconsin Press eBooks · 2019-04-16 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• MWALIM BI SWAFIYA MUHASHAMY-SAID:

  Indiana University Press eBooks · 2018-01-26 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Muslim Women Leaders and Legal Reform in Postcolonial Kenya

  Hawwa · 2016-08-22 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The post-Cold War conditions created new socio-political spaces in Kenya for new articulations of Muslim women’s public activism and leadership. This essay focuses on two such Muslim women in terms of their leadership responses to issues of Muslim women’s rights in Kenya as framed within a secular paradigm, on the one hand, and within an Islamic one, on the other. In spite of their differences, the essay concludes the efforts of the two leaders complement each other in fundamental ways, especially with regards to their contributions to the national debates on the Shari’a and the reform of the Kadhi’s Court.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Fulera Issaka‐Toure

  9 shared

• Meredeth Turshen

  4 shared

• Alamin Mazrui

  Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

  2 shared

• Ahmad Alawad Sikainga

  1 shared

• Olivier De Marcellus

  1 shared

• Constantine George Caffentzis

  1 shared

• Silvia Federici

  Istituti di Ricovero e Cura a Carattere Scientifico

  1 shared

• Herman M. Batibo

  University of Botswana

  1 shared

Education

• B.A.

  Université Abdou Moumouni (Niamey)

• M.A.

  Indiana

• Ph.D.

  Indiana