

Beschreibung
Now in this Essential Amadiume edition designed to bring Amadiume''s groundbreaking ideas to a new generation of readers, this extraordinary book issues a clarion call for a new understanding of Africa, one made and written by Africans . Here Amadiume issues a...Now in this Essential Amadiume edition designed to bring Amadiume''s groundbreaking ideas to a new generation of readers, this extraordinary book issues a clarion call for a new understanding of Africa, one made and written by Africans . Here Amadiume issues a seminal challenge to Western anthropologists to recognize their own complicity in producing a version of Africa that is often little more than a reflection of their own class-based, patriarchal thought. Amadiume explores how imperialism, violence, patriarchy and class-based social structures - originally imposed by colonialism - have become internalized to result in a contemporary Africa cursed with neo-colonial states. She uncovers the hidden matriarchal history of Africa, which continues to empower women in political struggle throughout the continent. She looks at the masculinization of indigenous African religions, effected largely by the imposition of Christianity and Islam. Ultimately, she provides a guide to the main Afro-centric social theorists, writing a new social history of their continent. Dedicated to the diasporic African communities in their struggle to construct alternative, anti-racist and anti-imperialist epistemologies of self-representation and self-generated ideals, this is a radical vision of Africa from the powerful voice of an African woman.
Autorentext
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.
Klappentext
Now in this Essential Amadiume edition designed to bring Amadiume's groundbreaking ideas to a new generation of readers, this extraordinary book issues a clarion call for a new understanding of Africa, one made and written by Africans**.** Here Amadiume issues a seminal challenge to Western anthropologists to recognize their own complicity in producing a version of Africa that is often little more than a reflection of their own class-based, patriarchal thought.
Amadiume explores how imperialism, violence, patriarchy and class-based social structures - originally imposed by colonialism - have become internalized to result in a contemporary Africa cursed with neo-colonial states. She uncovers the hidden matriarchal history of Africa, which continues to empower women in political struggle throughout the continent. She looks at the masculinization of indigenous African religions, effected largely by the imposition of Christianity and Islam. Ultimately, she provides a guide to the main Afro-centric social theorists, writing a new social history of their continent.
Dedicated to the diasporic African communities in their struggle to construct alternative, anti-racist and anti-imperialist epistemologies of self-representation and self-generated ideals, this is a radical vision of Africa from the powerful voice of an African woman.
Inhalt
Foreword to the Essential Amadiume Edition
Introduction: Writing Africa
Part I: Rewriting History
Gender and the Contestation of Religion: A Historical Perspective on African societies
Part II: Decolonizing History