SOURCE: Owusu, Kofi. “Canons under Siege: Blackness, Femaleness, and Ama Ata Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy.” Callaloo 13, no. 2 (spring 1990): 341-63.

In the following essay, Owusu considers the impact of racial and gender issues on Our Sister Killjoy, commenting that the novel “seems to defy easy categorization, and one soon gets the impression that it defines itself by this very fact.”

[T]here is a Eurocentric view that the movement for women's liberation is not indigenous to Asia or Africa, but has been a purely West European and North American phenomenon, and that where movements for women's emancipation … have arisen in the Third World, they have been merely imitative of Western models.

—Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World

The process of correcting the portrayal of Black women has involved both the creative writer and the scholar-critic, and oftentimes one person serves both functions.

—Stephen Henderson, Introduction to...