African Possibilities

<p><b>This book offers a bold new blueprint for <i>matriarchitarianism</i>, a critique of all forms of social injustice rooted in a distinctly African notion of a shared matriarchal-relational humanism.</b><br><br>Forty years after her hugely influential <i>Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society</i>—a book that foreshadowed contemporary gender theory three years before Judith Butler's <i>Gender Trouble</i>—award-winning author and poet Ifi Amadiume propels gender relations beyond dichotomies and discriminations and towards a power-sharing argument in discourse, contestation and resistance.<br><br>Representing the culmination of over 40 years of ground-breaking work on notions of matriarchy at the intersection of the Igbo-African universe and the Western capitalist reality, Amadiume applies her newly developed matriarchitarian principles to a dazzling array of subjects: from religious leadership, kinship and family relations to sexuality, creative writing and matters of conscience in race, class and gender. <i>African Possibilities</i> explodes our notions of matriarchy into original and compelling arguments and offers a radical alternative approach to the world’s entrenched injustices.<br><br>Now in paperback for the first time and including a new essay by Amadiume on African Indigenous women's thought.</p>