Jacqueline-Bethel Mougoué

Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué is an Associate Professor of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the USA with additional affiliations in the Department of History and the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies. As an interdisciplinary historian of Africa, she draws from history, gender studies, feminist studies, and political science to examine 20th-century African history. She is the author of Gender, Separatist Politics, and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon (the University of Michigan Press, 2019). The book received the 2020 Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize and the 2021 Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize; Mougoué was selected as one of 15 African women historians shaping understandings of Africa’s historical past by AMAKA magazine in 2022.

Interdisciplinary Fellow Group on Increasing Women’s Political Presence in West Africa (IFG 8)

During my MIASA fellowship I will pen two chapters of my second book project, tentatively titled Pan-African Lives, Racial Politics, and Belonging in Africa. The book project expands definitions of the African diaspora and decenters western locales/perspectives. The project focuses on a diverse group of individuals of color—Africans, Black Americans, Persians, and Indians—to explore historical understandings of Africanness and recognize the development of African diasporic experiences amongst global minorities in mid-twentieth century West Africa (1950s-1970s). The two chapters I will focus on will highlight the lives of west African women across borders, emphasizing their maternal politics on the local and continental levels.