Women’s labor in African urban centers permeates every sphere of urban life, yet its full scope remains understated in scholarly accounts. Akinwole introduces “holistic articulation” as a method for reading African women’s discursive labor. Holistic articulation names an analytical strategy of linking discursive fragments about women’s labor across multiple archives: social history, African literature, popular journalism, mythography, and everyday expressions. By tracing these connections, holistic articulation highlights the breadth of African women’s space-making and performative labor. This approach extends existing frameworks for analyzing African women’s labor by foregrounding its discursive and imaginative dimensions.
