The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourse, and: For Women and the Nation: Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti of Nigeria, and: Dislocating Cultures: Third World Feminism and the Politics of Knowledge (review)

The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourse by Oyeronke Oyewumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, 240 pp., $54.95 hardcover, $21.95 paper.

For Women and the Nation: Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti of Nigeria by Cheryl Johnson-Odim and Nina Emma Mba. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997, 256 pp., $36.95 hardcover, $19.95 paper.

Dislocating Cultures: Third World Feminism and the Politics of Knowledge by Uma Narayan. London: Routledge, 1997, 176 pp., $70.00 hardcover, $25.99 paper.

Interest in studies of colonialism, post-colonialism, nationalism, and feminism in non-Western countries has grown in recent years as more and more scholars are trying to understand the multilayered complexities of these issues. At first glance, these three books seem too disparate to be reviewed together. But closer readings of them reveal that all three authors have a common focus on colonialism, nationalism, post-colonialism, and feminism in Africa and India. Furthermore, all three authors have challenged many of the assumptions of Western feminists.

Oyeronke Oyewumi's The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourse is an extremely interesting work. In the preface of her book, Oyewumi writes that the main theme of this book is to demonstrate why and how gender came to be constructed in the Yoruba society of southwestern Nigeria and how gender became a fundamental category in academic scholarship on the Yoruba. To prove her points, Oyewumi challenged a basic Western feminist belief that gender is a fundamental organizing principle in all societies and is therefore always apparent, and also another claim that there is an essential category "woman" that is characterized by the social uniformity of its members and that the subordination of woman is universal.

Through chapters like "Visualizing the Body: Western Theories and African Subjects," "(Re)constituting the Cosmology and Sociocultural Institutions of Oyo-Yoruba," and "Making History, Creating Gender: The Invention of Men and Kings in the Writing of Oyo Oral Traditions," Oyewumi points out that woman as a social category did not exist in Yoruba society in pre-colonial time. She asserts that the Western concept of gender is body-oriented, a concept that never emerged in Yoruba society. Although Yoruba society was hierarchically organized, the ranking of individuals depended on seniority or age and not on gender. The social identity was relational and not genderized. According to Oyewumi, the Atlantic slave trade brought a change in Yoruba society from an age-based social structure to a gender-based hierarchy. The colonial atmosphere made its entry in Yoruba society with the Atlantic slave trade and not with the New Imperialism of the late nineteenth century. In pre-Atlantic slave trade days, Yoruba language was not gender specific, having no reference to such words as son, daughter, brother, or sister. Yoruba names were also not gender-specific. Therefore, from the dynastic lists, popularly known as kings' lists, scholars cannot automatically assume that all the rulers in the list are male. But recent Yoruba scholars/historians familiar with the culture and language have assumed that male is the norm; following English/Western tradition they have patriarchalized Yoruba history and culture (29-30). What Oyewumi cogently argues, using pre-colonial Yoruba society as a case study, is that though gender as a category of analysis works for Western societies and cultures, the same analytical theory cannot be applied to other areas of the world unless one wants to impose Western gender theories to interpret other cultures.

In a chapter titled "Colonizing Bodies and Minds: Gender and Colonialism," Oyewumi discusses the ways colonial patriarchal structure changed Yoruba social and political structures. On the eve of colonization...