Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
There is significant religious and linguistic evidence that Yoruba 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?wumi explores the intersections of gender, history, knowledge-making, and the role of intellectuals in the process."
Synopsis
Introduction: Exhuming Subjugated Knowledge and Liberating Marginalized Epistemes
1. Divining knowledge: The Man Question in If
2. (Re)Casting the Yor b World: If , y and the Signification of Difference
3. Matripotency: y in Philosophical Concempts and Socio-Policial Institutions
4. Writing and Gendering the Past: Akw 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 Yor b Names Kosher for the Modern World
Conclusion: Motherhood in the Quest for Social Transformation
Glossary
Synopsis
In this book, Oyěw m extends her path-breaking thesis that in Yor b society, construction of gender is a colonial development since the culture exhibited no gender divisions in its original form. Taking seriously indigenous modes and categories of knowledge, she applies her finding of a non-gendered ontology to the social institutions of If , motherhood, marriage, family and naming practices. Oyěw m insists that contemporary assertions of male dominance must be understood, in part, as the work of local intellectuals who took marching orders from Euro/American mentors and colleagues. In exposing the depth of the coloniality of power, Oyěw m challenges us to look at the worlds we inhabit, anew.