Description: A seminal work for queer theory and non-Western feminism that challenges the historical universality of Western conceptions of gender and uncovers precolonial African alternatives
Brief description: Ifi Amadiume is a award-winning poet and a political activist as well as an academic. She has lived in Nigeria and the UK and is currently a professor at Dartmouth College, USA. There, she teaches both in the Department of Religion and on the African-American Studies Programme. Professor Amadiume is author of the influential Male Daughters, Female Husbands (Zed Books, 1988) which won the Choice Outstanding Academic Book of the Year award in 1989.
Review Quotes:
"Meticulously researched... An extremely important contribution." --Africa
"Ifi Amadiume, a Nigerian sociologist, has stepped out of the academic sidelines to tackle head on the issue of racist social anthropology." --Africa Events "Required reading in a cross-cultural women's studies course... A book well researched, clearly written, with a good bibliography, and efficiently produced one that can be depended upon to provoke lively discussion." --Choice Magazine "Essential reading for anyone interested in fundamental thinking about the issues of gender and sex in pre-colonial societies." --Guardian, Nigeria "Male Daughters and Female Husbands is a brilliant inspiration to open up gender theory to the originality of African philosophies of being, social life and power. Amadiume argues, from detailed evidence, that new potential emerges when we search past "suppressed and fragmented information", to find Africa's own concepts and practices of matricentricity and genderlessness, and the social history of women's movements." --Jane I Guyer, Johns Hopkins University "Male Daughters, Female Husbands is a groundbreaking work in the study of gender in Africa. It presents a subtle, honest and clear portrait of gendered roles that upsets both the usual Western assumptions about how human societies can be organized and several propagandistic treatments of gender in Africa that have been published in the intervening years. This new edition of Amadiume's magnum opus deserves to be widely read." --Professor J. Lorand Matory, Duke University "This is a text that should be read widely and includes women's studies, social sciences and history. It will surely be an important statement in the catalogue of anti-colonialist historiography." --West Africa