African Possibilities

This book offers a bold new blueprint for matriarchitarianism, a critique of all forms of social injustice rooted in a distinctly African notion of a shared matriarchal-relational humanism. Forty years after her hugely influential Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society—a book that foreshadowed contemporary gender theory three years before Judith Butler's Gender Trouble—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. 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. African Possibilities explodes our notions of matriarchy into original and compelling arguments and offers a radical alternative approach to the world’s entrenched injustices. Now in paperback for the first time and including a new essay by Amadiume on African Indigenous women's thought.