Chinua Achebe and the Igbo-African World: Between Fiction, Fact, and Historical Representation explores Chinua Achebe's literary works and how they communicated the Igbo-African world to readers. Engaging in the politics of representation, Achebe sought to demystify deterministic views of race and cultural ethnocentrism. While his books and commentaries have been very influential in shaping a unique and multifaceted view of the African world, some scholars have challenged Achebe's representations of historical reality. Through in-depth analyses of his writing, contributors examine the interpretations Achebe imposed on African culture and history in his texts. The chapters cover Achebe's engagement with critical issues like historical representation, gender relations, and indigenous political institutions in a changing society. Throughout, contributors present new ways for understanding Achebe's literary works and show how his work draws from African historical reality and identity while challenging Western epistemological hegemony.

In this latest book by the award-winning author of the hugely influential Male Daughters, Female Husbands, Ifi Admadiume 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 sets forth a blueprint for a bold new matriarchitarianism, critiquing all forms of social injustice with a shared matriarchal-relational humanism. In each chapter of the book, Amadiume applies these 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.

In 1987, more than a decade before the dawn of queer theory, Ifi Amadiume wrote Male Daughters, Female Husbands, to critical acclaim. This compelling and highly original book frees the subject position of 'husband' from its affiliation with men, and goes on to do the same for other masculine attributes, dislocating sex, gender and sexual orientation. Boldly arguing that the notion of gender, as constructed in Western feminist discourse, did not exist in Africa before the colonial imposition of a dichotomous understanding of sexual difference, Male Daughters, Female Husbands examines the structures in African society that enabled people to achieve power, showing that roles were not rigidly masculinized nor feminized. At a time when gender and queer theory are viewed by some as being stuck in an identity-politics rut, this outstanding study not only warns against the danger of projecting a very specific, Western notion of difference onto other cultures, but calls us to question the very concept of gender itself.

Using the idea of a collectivist, humanist culture of traditional African matriarchal heritage, Ifi Amadiume contrasts daughters of the Goddess to a corrupt and oppressive culture of imperialism that she argues is the heritage of contemporary elite-led women's organizations. She examines the activities of such organizations in Nigeria, making comparisons with those in Britain and South Africa as well as international movements; looking at the 1995 Beijing International Women's Conferences, she explores internationalism as an instrument of class reproduction. The author provides a detailed account of the structures and workings of local government in Nigeria and Britain as she raises theoretical and policy issues about civic groups, civil society and the nature of the late twentieth century state. Finally, Professor Amadiume draws lessons from her own experiences working in local government to suggest measures for true gender equity and the democratisation of politics in our increasingly multicultural and multiethnic societies. This book asks some hard questions of contemporary feminist movements and provides the most detailed account available of Nigerian women's politics.

Why does conflict deteriorate into violence and war? How does collective memory influence healing and social justice in post-conflict situations? What is the role of judicial accountability - Crime Tribunals and Truth Commissions - for past violations of human rights? This book brings together a distinguished group of scholars, policy-makers, justice workers and social activists to answer these questions. In a creative engagement with issues of human rights in relation to truth, healing and social justice, they look at how people rebuild broken communities and the tensions between reconciliation and social justice in post-conflict situations. The book is structured round the themes of social justice, the nature of conflict, judicial accountability and the role of truth commissions. Opening with Wole Soyinka's exploration of 'that burden of memory that a continent seeks to exorcise through the strategy of reparations', the first part of the book addresses questions of social justice as both ends and means of healing and reconciliation. The contributors go on to look at the nature and dynamics of conflict while parts three and four consider judicial accountability and the role of truth commissions as approachs to healing and social justice. The book concludes with a chapter on the pursuit of justice as an underlying cause of civil wars in Africa and elsewhere. Exploring the cases of Uganda, Sudan, Rwanda, South Africa, Nigeria, Latin America and the former Yugoslavia and including consideration of the gendered elements of conflict, this book is urgent reading for students and academics in peace and conflict and African Studies.

This extraordinary book issues a clarion call for a new understanding of Africa. The author of the best-selling Male Daughters/Female Husbands here issues a 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.
Professor Amadiume calls instead for a new history of Africa, made and written by Africans. This is such a book.
The book
* 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.
* uncovers the hidden matriarchal history of Africa which continues to empower women in political struggle throughout the continent
* looks at the masculinization of indigenous African religions, effected largely by the imposition of Christianity and Islam
* 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 the beginning of a new vision of Africa, from the powerful voice of an African woman.

Straddling disciplines and continents, Feminist Futures interweaves scholarship and social activism to explore the evolving position of women in the South. Working at the intersection of cultural studies, critical development studies and feminist theory, the book's contributors articulate a radical and innovative framework for understanding the linkages between women, culture and development, applying it to issues ranging from sexuality and the gendered body to the environment, technology and the cultural politics of representation. This revised and updated edition brings together leading academics, as well as a new generation of activists and scholars, to provide a fresh perspective on the ways in which women in the South are transforming our understanding of development.