In this article we aim to show the potential of cross-continental dialogues for a decolonizing feminism. We relate the work of one of the major critics of the Western metaphysical patriarchal order, Luce Irigaray, to the critique of the colonial/modern gender system by the Nigerian feminist scholar Oyĕrónké Oyĕwùmí. Oyĕwùmí's work is often rejected based on the argument that it is empirically wrong. We start by problematizing this line of thinking by providing an epistemological interpretation of Oyĕwùmí's claims. We then (...) draw Irigaray and Oyĕwùmí into conversation, and show how this bolsters and helps to further illuminate and contextualize Oyĕwùmí's critique of gender. But the dialogue between these thinkers also reveals significant limitations of Irigaray's philosophy, namely her presumption of the priority of sexual difference, its rigid duality, and her failure to take into account the inextricable intertwinement of gender and race in the Western patriarchal order. Relating Irigaray's critique of Western culture's forgetting of sexual difference to Oyĕwùmí's critique hence demonstrates to what extent Irigaray's philosophy remains typically Western and how she therefore fails to escape the paradigm that she is so critical of. (shrink)

Este artigo busca esc(r)utar o pensamento da filósofa iorubá Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, que modifica nossa compreensão das culturas africanas, notadamente em relação à raça e ao gênero. Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí ao nos chamar a atenção que antes da colonização britânica a sociedade Oyó-Iorubá do sudoeste da Nigéria não se organizava em torno de hierarquias decorrentes da di-visão por corpo generificado, mas da senioridade, nos apresenta cosmologia e instituições socioculturais Oyó-Iorubás assentadas na cosmopercepção de quem não é permanentemente e indefinidamente mais velho ou (...) mais novo que outra pessoa. Nesse sentido, trazer o pensamento de Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí para o exercício do ensino de filosofia contribui para pensá-lo além da transmissão histórica da filosofia e das ideias de pensadores ocidentais, abordando assim seres e saberes africanos que deságuam em tradições, cosmologias e instituições socioculturais presentes no Brasil, das quais professoras(es) e estudantes são herdeiras(os). (shrink)

In this accessible book, Barry Hallen discusses the major ideas, figures, and schools of thought in African philosophy. While drawing out critical issues in the formation of African philosophy, Hallen focuses on the recent scholarship, current issues, and relevant debates that have made African philosophy an important key to understanding the rich and complex cultural heritage of Africa. Hallen builds upon Africa's connections with Western philosophical traditions and explores African contributions to cultural universalism, cultural relativism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and Marxism. Hallen (...) also examines African challenges to Western conceptions of philosophy by taking on questions such as whether philosophy can exist in cultures that are significantly based in oral traditions and what may or may not constitute philosophical texts. Among the figures whose work is discussed are Ptah-hotep, Zar'a Ya'aqob, Anton Wilhelm Amo, Paulin Hountondji, V. Y. Mudimbe, Oyeronke Oyewumi, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Kwasi Wiredu. This clearly written, highly readable, and concise work will be essential for students and scholars of African philosophy as well as readers with a wide range of interests in African studies. (shrink)

In this chapter I problematize Beauvoir's analogical analyses in The Second Sex, arguing that her utilization of the race/gender analogy omits the experiences and oppressions of Black women. Furthermore, taking into account select secondary literature that emphasizes these issues, I argue that several of Beauvoir's white feminist defenders and critics share in common their non‐engagement with Black feminist literature on Beauvoir. Put another way, Black feminists who explicitly take up Beauvoir in their writings have remained largely unacknowledged in the secondary (...) literature on Beauvoir by white feminists. As a corrective to this erasure, I highlight the scholarly contributions of Black feminists including Loraine Hansberry, Chikwenye Ogunyemi, Deborah King, Oyeronke Oyewumi, and bell hooks. (shrink)

In this article the authors discuss in broad strokes the work of two theorists, namely Nigerian sociologist Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí and Argentinian philosopher Maria Lugones to argue that a specific logic of sexualisation accompanied, permeated and coloured the colonial project of racialising the ‘native’. The sexual wound which to a great extent explains the abjection of the racialised body, is a key aspect of the colony and should therefore also be a central theme in any properly critical discourse on decolonisation in (...) Africa. After drawing on Oyĕwùmí and Lugones to make their central argument, the authors apply this framework to the problem of sexual violence in South Africa. Understanding the nature of the sexual-racial wound of coloniality will not only ensure that the problem of sexual violence gets properly addressed as a central question of decolonisation, but will also suggest new ways of concretely addressing the problem. In particular, the dominant discourse needs to shift away from the ‘emasculated man’ trope and towards a critical feminist decoloniality which views the radical dehumanisation of native woman as key to colonial violence understood as a world-destructive. (shrink)

O artigo pretende realizar um debate sobre os fatores sociais, culturais e históricos presentes nas sociedades africanas pré-coloniais que contribuíram para sua forma de organização matrilinear. Partindo da análise das obras de três autores africanos, sendo eles Cheik Anta Diop, Ifi Amadiume e Oyeronke Oyewumi, assim como realizando a partir da produção destes um debate historiográfico centrado na compreensão dos fatores presentes na organização social que conferiam um elevado status social e político às mulheres e o papel por elas exercido (...) nas sociedades matrilineares africanas. Através da proposta deste debate, buscaremos compreender como as categorias de gênero e mulher estão presentes nestes discursos e as questões relacionadas ao uso de conceitos ocidentais em realidades diferentes, como no caso das sociedades africanas. Para levantar tais questionamentos, utilizaremos uma perspectiva afrocentrada, a fim de buscar análises e interpretações que visem demonstrar a centralidade do africano como sujeito de sua história e cultura. Palavras-chave: Mulher; Gênero; Matrilinearidade; Matrifocalidade; Afrocentrismo. (shrink)

In her book Antigone's Claim: Kinship between Life and Death, Judith Butler reads the figure of Antigone, who exists as an impossible aberration of kinship, as a challenge to the very terms of livability that are established by the reigning symbolic rules of Western thought. In this article I extend Butler's argument to reach beyond gender. I argue that African feminist scholarship shows that the kinship norms shaping the reigning symbolic rules of Western thought not only render certain gendered lives (...) unlivable, but through the gendered working thereof also become key to the colonial process of the racial dehumanization of the colonized and the violent expansion of Eurocentric capitalism. I show how Oyèrónké Oyĕwùmí, in her work on the Yorùbá people of Nigeria, provides, in a way analogous to Antigone, a glimpse of an order structured by kinship formations that are remarkably different from, and thereby bring into crisis, the normative versions of kinship that are posited as timeless truths. Through a reimagining or reconstruction of precolonial Yorùbá kinship formations, Oyĕwùmí articulates a different scheme of intelligibility, which enables radically different ways of being human and existing in the world. (shrink)