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There is significant religious and linguistic evidence that Yorùbá society was not gendered in its original form. In this follow-up to The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses , Oy?wùmí explores the intersections of gender, history, knowledge-making, and the role of intellectuals in the process.
List of contents
Introduction: Exhuming Subjugated Knowledge and Liberating Marginalized Epistemes
1. Divining knowledge: The Man Question in Ifá
2. (Re)Casting the Yorùbá World: Ifá, Ìyá and the Signification of Difference
3. Matripotency: Ìyá in Philosophical Concempts and Socio-Policial Institutions
4. Writing and Gendering the Past: Ak??wé and the Endogenous Production of History
5. The Gender Dictaters: Making Gender Attributions in Religion and Culture
6. Towards a Genealogy of Gender, Gendered Names, and Naming Practices
7. The Poetry of Weeping Brides: The Role and Impact of Marriage Residence in the Making of Praise Names
8. Changing Names: The Roles of Christianity and Islam in Making Yorùbá Names Kosher for the Modern World
Conclusion: Motherhood in the Quest for Social Transformation
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About the author
Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí is Associate Professor of Sociology at SUNY Stony Brook, USA. She was born in Nigeria and educated at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and the University of California at Berkeley, USA. Her monograph, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses won the 1998 Distinguished Book Award of the Sex and Gender Section of the American Sociological Association, and was a finalist for the Herskovitts Prize of the African Studies Association in the same year.
Summary
In this book, Oyewùmí extends her path-breaking thesis that in Yorùbá society, construction of gender is a colonial development since the culture exhibited no gender divisions in its original form.
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