Herself an Author addresses the critical question of how to approach the study of women's writing. It explores various methods of engaging in a meaningful way with a rich corpus of poetry and prose written by women of the late Ming and Qing periods, much of it rediscovered by the author in rare book collections in China and the United States. The volume treats different genres of writing and includes translations of texts that are made available for the first time in English. Among the works considered are the life-long poetic record of Gan Lirou, the lyrical travel journal kept by Wang Fengxian, and the erotic poetry of the concubine Shen Cai. Taking the view that gentry women's varied textual production was a form of cultural practice, Grace Fong examines women's autobiographical poetry collections, travel writings, and critical discourse on the subject of women's poetry, offering fresh insights on women's intervention into the dominant male literary tradition. The wealth of texts translated and discussed here include fascinating documents written by concubines--women who occupied a subordinate position in the family and social system. Fong adopts the notion of agency as a theoretical focus to investigate forms of subjectivity and enactments of subject positions in the intersection between textual practice and social inscription. Her reading of the life and work of women writers reveals surprising instances and modes of self-empowerment within the gender constraints of Confucian orthodoxy. Fong argues that literate women in late imperial China used writing and reading to create literary and social communities, transcend temporal-spatial and social limitations, and represent themselvesas the authors of their own life histories.

The dark story of the shocking resurgence of white supremacist and nationalist groups, and their path to political power



Six years ago, when Vegas Tenold began reporting from the inner circle of three white power groups in America -- the KKK, the National Socialist Movement, and the Traditionalist Workers Party -- he found himself in the midst of small, disorganized groups operating well outside the mainstream.

But in the last few years, that has all changed. Their racially-motivated violence has been on open display at rallies in Charlottesville, Berkeley, Pikesville, Phoenix, and Boston. In response to economic grievances, anger over the presidency of Barack Obama and the visibility of Black Lives Matter, and egged on by the rhetoric of Donald Trump, membership is rising and national politicians are giving validation to these groups. One young man has emerged as a powerful figure: Matthew Heimbach of the Traditionalist Workers Party, who was once labeled the "Little Führer" by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Heimbach believes that cross burning and fight-ridden conventions are a waste of time. He understands political power, and has organized a coalition of white nationalists to bring these groups into the mainstream.

Everything You Love Will Burn gives readers a front-row seat at violent white supremacist conventions, newly formed separatist communities, and backroom meetings with Republican operatives. We meet a neo-Nazi lieutenant and his daughter in Brooklyn's Sheepshead Bay; a bubbly, twenty-something Klanswoman in Tennessee; and a solemn skinhead recruit in Georgia, and learn about why they've tied their fates to these movements. By turns frightening and fascinating, Everything You Love Will Burn shows us the future of hate in America.

Designed to be used with any deck, Red Tarot is a radical praxis and decolonized oracle that moves beyond self-help and divination to reclaim tarot for liberation, self-determination, and collective healing.

For readers of Postcolonial Astrology and Tarot for Change

Red Tarot speaks to anyone othered for their identity or ways of being or thinking—LGBTQIA2S+ and BIPOC folks in particular—presenting the tarot as a radical epistemology that shifts the authority of knowing into the hands of the people themselves.

Author Christopher Marmolejo frames literacy as key to liberation, and explores an understanding of tarot as critical literacy. They show how the cards can be read to subvert the dynamics of white supremacist-capitalist-imperialist-patriarchy, weaving historical context and spiritual practice into a comprehensive overview of tarot.

Situating tarot imagery within cosmologies outside the Hellenistic frame—Death as interpreted through the lens of Hindu goddess Chhinnamasta, the High Priestess through Aztec goddess Coyolxauhqui—Marmolejo’s Red Tarot is a profound act of native reclamation and liberation. Each card’s interpretation is further bolstered by the teachings of Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Paulo Freire, José Esteban Muñoz, and others, in an offering that integrates intersectional wisdom with the author’s divination practice—and reveals tarot as an essential language for liberation.

A groundbreaking work of science fiction, <i>The Left Hand of Darkness</i> tells the story of a lone human emissary to Winter, an alien world whose inhabitants spend most of their time without a gender. His goal is to facilitate Winter's inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the completely dissimilar culture that he encounters.<br /><br />Embracing the aspects of psychology, society, and human emotion on an alien world, <i>The Left Hand of Darkness</i> stands as a landmark achievement in the annals of intellectual science fiction.

在鸡肉加工厂里给鸡拔毛，在美甲店里给人修脚，在田地里捡虫子，在流水线上贴标签。我们离开故乡，怀着希望来到这里，不是为了做这些工作的。
但工作就是工作。就算是那样的工作，你也能保持你的尊严。
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惊艳欧美文坛的老挝裔作家，以极简文字引爆情感炸弹
获加拿大最高文学奖吉勒文学奖、安大略崔灵图书奖
《时代》2020年度必读书，《名利场》2020上半年最佳图书
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十四则富有洞察力的速写呈现了老挝难民的日常工作和私人生活。那些在家禽加工厂、养猪场和美甲沙龙里从事“世界上最繁重工作”的人，也怀有生动的幻想……他们在无法融入的地方，短暂地一瞥自由的模样。
——《纽约客》
极简的语言加上轻松的幽默，让我们得以瞥见一个无名城市的移民和难民的日常生活，像一束光照亮了那些往往被我们忽视的人的欲望、失落与成功……这些故事是如此广阔。虽然篇幅不长，可以一口气读完，却给人以充分的漫游空间。
——《巴黎评论》
简洁严谨的故事充斥着疏离和错位的主题，笔下的人物被无形的存在感所困扰……她在荒诞方面的天赋，意味着故事永远不会让人觉得沉闷或可预测。
——《纽约时报书评周刊》
这些短篇小说的语言很克制，却是情感的定时炸弹。
——凯瑞恩·戈兹沃西（澳大利亚文学评论家）
一部令人惊叹的小说集，用令人心碎的优美行文刻画了移民经历。它所记录的情感的广度着实非同凡响。这些故事蕴含着希望、伤痛、排斥、失落，以及在一片陌生的土地上寻找立足之地的过程。
——吉勒文学奖颁奖词
每当我们听到关于移民和难民的故事时，我们听到的都是成功。总是孩子们考上了斯坦福大学，或者获得了化学博士学位，或者我们是勇敢的英雄，在大楼边上救了一个悬空的婴儿，或者我们富得流油。我只想写关于难民和移民自己的故事，他们正在努力度过下一分钟、下一小时、下一天或下一年。这些生活也很重要，也很成功。
——苏万康·塔玛冯萨
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内容简介：
过气拳击手改行做美甲，却意外大受欢迎。
养鸡场里靠给鸡拔毛为生的女工，幻想着隆鼻手术能改变她平庸的生活。
七十岁的寡妇与三十岁的邻居，陷入一段疯狂而悲伤的恋情。
认真对待每一份卑微工作的母亲，哪怕是捉虫也要捉得又快又好。
一年级小女孩面对她不会念的单词，为了父亲的尊严而与老师据理力争。
……
十四个短小而锐利的故事，聚焦身处城市底层的老挝移民，以及他们奋力为自己争取一席之地的过程。塔玛冯萨以洗练而轻盈的笔法勾勒出人们努力生活的状态，照亮他们往往不被看见的挣扎、失落、希望与爱。
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“那些夜晚，当我们坐在一起吃饭的时候，每个人都会谈起他们的工作，他们的老板，老家的日子有多难过，以及他们如何都来到了我们现在生活的这个国家——但没有人哭，没有人说丧气话。他们全都哈哈大笑。故事越伤感，笑声越响亮。”

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780316422130 .

In the title story of Souvankham Thammavongsa's debut collection, a young girl brings a book home from school and asks her father to help her pronounce a tricky word, a simple exchange with unforgettable consequences. Thammavongsa is a master at homing in on moments like this -- moments of exposure, dislocation, and messy feeling that push us right up against the limits of language.

The stories that make up How to Pronounce Knife focus on characters struggling to find their bearings in unfamiliar territory, or shuttling between idioms, cultures, and values. A failed boxer discovers what it truly means to be a champion when he starts painting nails at his sister's salon. A young woman tries to discern the invisible but immutable social hierarchies at a chicken processing plant. A mother coaches her daughter in the challenging art of worm harvesting.

In a taut, visceral prose style that establishes her as one of the most striking and assured voices of her generation, Thammavongsa interrogates what it means to make a living , to work, and to create meaning.

How to pronounce knife --
Paris --
Slingshot --
Randy Travis --
Mani pedi --
Chick-a-chee! --
The universe would be so cruel --
Edge of the world --
The school bus driver --
You are so embarassing --
Ewwrrkk --
The gas station --
A far distant thing --
Picking worms

The instant New York Times Bestseller • Nominated for the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction

“A lyrical work of self-discovery that’s shockingly intimate and insistently universal…Not so much briefly gorgeous as permanently stunning.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post

Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.

With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.

Named a Best Book of the Year by: 
GQ, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Library Journal, TIME, Esquire, The Washington Post, Apple, Good Housekeeping, The New Yorker, The New York Public Library, Elle.com, The Guardian, The A.V. Club, NPR, Lithub, Entertainment Weekly, Vogue.com, The San Francisco Chronicle, Mother Jones, Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal Magazine and more! 

Mireille Duval Jameson is living a fairy tale. The strong-willed youngest daughter of one of Haiti’s richest sons, she has an adoring husband, a precocious infant son, by all appearances a perfect life. The fairy tale ends one day when Mireille is kidnapped in broad daylight by a gang of heavily armed men, in front of her father’s Port au Prince estate. Held captive by a man who calls himself The Commander, Mireille waits for her father to pay her ransom. As it becomes clear her father intends to resist the kidnappers, Mireille must endure the torments of a man who resents everything she represents.

An Untamed State is a novel of privilege in the face of crushing poverty, and of the lawless anger that corrupt governments produce. It is the story of a wilful woman attempting to find her way back to the person she once was, and of how redemption is found in the most unexpected of places. An Untamed State establishes Roxane Gay as a writer of prodigious, arresting talent.

With a breathtaking array of original stories from around the world, P. Djèlí Clark, Amal El Mohtar, Garth Nix, Darcie Little Badger, Sheree Renée Thomas, and two dozen other fantasy and science fiction geniuses bring a new and exciting twist to one of the most beloved figures in fiction, witches, in never-before-seen works written exclusively for The Book of Witches , compiled by award-winning editor Jonathan Strahan and illustrated by award-nominated artist Alyssa Winans.

Witches! Whether you know them from Shakespeare or from Wicked, there is no staple more beloved in folklore, fairy tale, or fantasy than these magical beings. Witches are everywhere, and at the heart of stories that resonate with many people around the world. This dazzling, otherworldly collection gathers new stories of witches from all walks of life, ensuring a Halloween readers will never forget. Whether they be maiden, mother, crone, or other; funny, fierce, light and airy, or dark and disturbing; witches are a vital part of some of the greatest stories we have, and new ones start here!

Bringing together twenty-nine stories and poems from some of the greatest science fiction and fantasy writers working today, including three tales from a BIPOC-only open submission period, The Book of Witches features Linda Addison, C.L. Clark, P Djeli Clark, Indrapramit Das, Amal El Mohtar, Andrea Hairston, Millie Ho, Saad Hossain, Kathleen Jennings, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Cassandra Khaw, Fonda Lee, Darcie Little Badger, Ken Liu, Usman T. Malik, Maureen F. McHugh, Premee Mohamed, Garth Nix, Tobi Ogundiran, Tochi Onyebuchi, Miyuki Jane Pinckard, Kelly Robson, Angela Slatter, Andrea Stewart, Emily Teng, Sheree Renée Thomas, Tade Thompson, and E. Lily Yu—and contains illustrations from three-time Hugo award-nominated artist Alyssa Winans throughout. This extraordinary anthology vividly breathes life into one of the most captivating and feared magical sorceresses and will become a treasured keepsake for fans of fantasy, science fiction, and fairy tales everywhere.

In The Power the world is a recognizable place: There's a rich Nigerian boy who lounges around the family pool; a foster kid whose religious parents hide their true nature; an ambitious American politician; and a tough London girl from a tricky family. But then a vital new force takes root and flourishes, causing their lives to converge with devastating effect. Teenage girls now have immense physical power: They can cause agonizing pain and even death. With this small twist of nature, the world drastically resets.

The Hugo Award-winning masterpiece of modern space opera - a gripping tale of galactic war told on a cosmic scale.

Thousands of years hence, many races inhabit a universe where a mind's potential is determined by its location in space - from superintelligent entities in the Transcend, to the limited minds of the Unthinking Depths, where only simple creatures and technology can function. Nobody knows what strange force partitioned space into these 'zones of thought', but when the warring Straumli realm use an ancient Transcendent artefact as a weapon, they unwittingly unleash an awesome power that destroys thousands of worlds and enslaves all natural and artificial intelligence.
Fleeing the threat, a family of scientists, including two children, are taken captive by the Tines - an alien race with a harsh medieval culture - and used as pawns in a ruthless power struggle. A rescue party, not entirely composed of humans, must free the children - and retrieve a secret that may save the rest of interstellar civilization.

A groundbreaking, urgent report from the front lines of "dirty work"―the work that society considers essential but morally compromised
Drone pilots who carry out targeted assassinations. Undocumented immigrants who man the “kill floors” of industrial slaughterhouses. Guards who patrol the wards of the United States’ most violent and abusive prisons. In Dirty Work, Eyal Press offers a paradigm-shifting view of the moral landscape of contemporary America through the stories of people who perform society’s most ethically troubling jobs. As Press shows, we are increasingly shielded and distanced from an array of morally questionable activities that other, less privileged people perform in our name.
The COVID-19 pandemic has drawn unprecedented attention to essential workers, and to the health and safety risks to which workers in prisons and slaughterhouses are exposed. But Dirty Work examines a less familiar set of occupational hazards: psychological and emotional hardships such as stigma, shame, PTSD, and moral injury. These burdens fall disproportionately on low-income workers, undocumented immigrants, women, and people of color.
Illuminating the moving, sometimes harrowing stories of the people doing society’s dirty work, and incisively examining the structures of power and complicity that shape their lives, Press reveals fundamental truths about the moral dimensions of work and the hidden costs of inequality in America.
"[A] disturbing and necessary new book . . . In Press's moral worldview, there are not only guilt and innocence, but rather fine-grained degrees of culpability and exculpation that fit uneasily with the sensibilities of a sound-bite-driven social media culture . . . It's a testament to his insight and vision that in spite of the ugliness to which he exposes us on almost every page, he still makes us want to set aside cynicism and pessimism and join him in finding ways to strengthen the moral bonds between us, however flawed we might be." ―Tasmin Shaw, New York Times Book Review
"Dirty Work makes a powerful case that, instead of vilifying dirty workers, Americans must reckon with what is being done in their name . . . Dirty Work is about weighty moral questions, but it's also about people, profiling dozens of workers and empathetically engaging with their crises of conscience. While never absolving his interviewees, [Press] forces readers to ask themselves whether, under similar circumstances, they would have behaved any differently . . . A rigorously argued, compassionately framed moral appeal that for some readers might serve as a wake-up call." ―Hank Stephenson, Shelf Awareness
"Engrossing and frequently enraging . . . Press’s lucid narrative is studded with gut-wrenching scenes . . . This deeply reported and eloquently argued account is a must-read." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Essential reading." ―Caren Nichter, Library Journal (starred review)
"Probing . . . A provocative book that will make readers more aware of terrible things done in their names." ―Kirkus
"Long before the COVID pandemic highlighted our dependence on essential workers, our existence as consumers and citizens was underpinned by an army of people doing jobs we might prefer not to think about. In this penetrating, astutely observed, beautifully written book, Eyal Press explores the lives of those who work these jobs: the corrections officer, the drone operator, the woman who slaughters chickens for a living. Dirty Work makes no easy judgments, but instead confronts a series of deep and vexing moral questions. It exposes the bonds of complicity that make this not just someone else's story, but one which implicates us all. A masterful, important book." ―Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Empire of Pain
"This is a scathing and thoughtful book about labor and principles―or, rather about when the former sabotages the latter, in the brutal industries that prop up American life, from our appetite for cheap meat and fossil fuel to mass incarceration to remote killing as part of our foreign policy to the tech industry’s amoral profit seeking. Though the moral injury impacts the workers first, it belongs to us all. Eyal Press brings this home in a series of powerful portraits of workers, and through considerations of both their industries and the ways we look away or are prevented from seeing what they do. Ultimately, Dirty Work is a book about human sacrifice and the forces that disguise it." ―Rebecca Solnit, author of Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir
“In this richly reported, disquieting book, Eyal Press highlights the stigmatizing, morally injurious work we ask some of the least advantaged members of society to perform in our name. Prison guards, slaughterhouse workers, and drone operators who carry out high-tech killings perform society’s 'dirty work' out of public view. This book will prompt a public reckoning with inequality in work by revealing how we are all implicated in the dirty work we outsource to others.” ―Michael J. Sandel, author of The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find the Common Good?
"Our society fights wars, imprisons criminals, produces food, and makes energy. However necessary it may be, the work involved is often ugly and violent. We want it done, cheaply, but don’t want to see it done. Enter Eyal Press, a writer in the tradition of George Orwell and Martha Gellhorn, who asks us to look at the dirty work that men and women do in our name. With measured prose and exquisite poise, Press describes the moral burden these workers assume, and analyzes the systemic inequities that burden reflects. The result is as stunning as it is disturbing." ―Corey Robin, author of The Enigma of Clarence Thomas

Centuries before, robots of Panga gained self-awareness, laid down their tools, wandered, en masse into the wilderness, never to be seen again. They faded into myth and urban legend.
Now the life of the tea monk who tells this story is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honor the old promise of checking in. The robot cannot go back until the question of "what do people need?" is answered. But the answer to that question depends on who you ask, and how. They will need to ask it a
Chambers' series asks: in a world where people have what they want, does having more matter?

Fast, fresh, plant-based dishes from Asian chef Ching-He Huang, offering her modern take on recipes that are traditionally meat and dairy free.
Asian food has always included a variety of meat and dairy free recipes. Focusing entirely on these plant- based dishes, Ching draws inspiration from across Asia to create simple, everyday, healthy home cooking that features protein-rich ingredients such as tofu, seitan, pulses, beans and grains.
The inspiration behind the book is Ching's husband, Jamie. From birth, he suffered from asthma and eczema but three and a half years ago, three months after adopting a vegan diet, he was cured. Ching has always believed in the age-old Chinese maxim that "food is medicine", and having experienced first-hand the transformation of her husband's health, she firmly believes in the healing power of plants to reduce inflammation, to restore, nourish and replenish.
This book is full of inspiring, quick and simple recipes, perfect for vegetarians, vegans and people looking to reduce the amount of meat in their diets.

Three generations of Taiwanese American women are haunted by the myths of their homeland in this spellbinding, visceral debut about one family’s queer desires, violent impulses, and buried secrets.
LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE • “Epic and intimate at once, Bestiary brings myth to visceral life. K-Ming Chang's talent exposes what is hidden inside us. She makes magic on the page.”—Julia Philips, author of Disappearing Earth
One evening, Mother tells Daughter a story about a tiger spirit who lived in a woman’s body. She was called Hu Gu Po, and she hungered to eat children, especially their toes. Soon afterward, Daughter awakes with a tiger tail. And more mysterious events follow: Holes in the backyard spit up letters penned by her grandmother; a visiting aunt arrives with snakes in her belly; a brother tests the possibility of flight. All the while, Daughter is falling for Ben, a neighborhood girl with strange powers of her own. As the two young lovers translate the grandmother’s letters, Daughter begins to understand that each woman in her family embodies a myth—and that she will have to bring her family’s secrets to light in order to change their destiny.
With a poetic voice of crackling electricity, K-Ming Chang is an explosive young writer who combines the wit and fabulism of Helen Oyeyemi with the subversive storytelling of Maxine Hong Kingston. Tracing one family’s history from Taiwan to America, from Arkansas to California, Bestiary is a novel of migration, queer lineages, and girlhood.

《不能承受的生命之轻》是米兰·昆德拉最负盛名的作品。小说描写了托马斯与特丽莎、萨丽娜之间的感情生活。但它不是一个男人和两个女人的三角性爱故事，它是一部哲理小说，小说从“永恒轮回”的讨论开始，把读者带入了对一系列问题的思考中，比如轻与重、灵与肉。
《不能承受的生命之轻》是一部意象繁复的书，其中装载了多种涵义：被政治化了的社会内涵的揭示、人性考察、个人命运在特定历史与政治语境下的呈现，以及对两性关系本质上的探索等。昆德拉将这些元素糅合在一起，写成一部非同凡响的小说——其中既有隐喻式的哲学思考，也有人的悲欢离合的生命历程的展现。

Called “powerful and provocative" by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, author of the New York Times bestselling How to be an Antiracist, this explosive book of history and cultural criticism reveals how white feminism has been used as a weapon of white supremacy and patriarchy deployed against Black and Indigenous women, and women of color.

Taking us from the slave era, when white women fought in court to keep “ownership” of their slaves, through the centuries of colonialism, when they offered a soft face for brutal tactics, to the modern workplace, White Tears/Brown Scars tells a charged story of white women’s active participation in campaigns of oppression. It offers a long overdue validation of the experiences of women of color.

Discussing subjects as varied as The Hunger Games, Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez, the viral BBQ Becky video, and 19th century lynchings of Mexicans in the American Southwest, Ruby Hamad undertakes a new investigation of gender and race. She shows how the division between innocent white women and racialized, sexualized women of color was created, and why this division is crucial to confront.

Along the way, there are revelatory responses to questions like: Why are white men not troubled by sexual assault on women? (See Christine Blasey Ford.) With rigor and precision, Hamad builds a powerful argument about the legacy of white superiority that we are socialized within, a reality that we must apprehend in order to fight.

"A stunning and thorough look at White womanhood that should be required reading for anyone who claims to be an intersectional feminist. Hamad’s controlled urgency makes the book an illuminating and poignant read. Hamad is a purveyor of such bold thinking, the only question is, are we ready to listen?" —Rosa Boshier, The Washington Post

Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye've produced. Choose life.

《法治的细节》是中国政法大学法学教授罗翔全新的法学随笔，面向大众读者，从热点案件解读、法学理念科普、经典名著讲解等6大板块，普及法律常识与法治观念。内容包括辛普森案、电车难题、性同意制度等法律基本常识，或N号房、张玉环案等时事热点的案件，多维度培育法律思维，助力法治社会的构建，点亮每个人心中的法治之光。<br /><br />此外，本书还收录了罗翔在爆红后的心路历程，分享其求学成长经历，袒露其心境的变化与成熟，与读者一起通过阅读与思辨，走出生活中的迷茫时刻，在现实中共同完善法治的细节。

The “woman question,” this book asserts, is a Western one, and not a proper lens for viewing African society. A work that rethinks gender as a Western construction, The Invention of Women offers a new way of understanding both Yoruban and Western cultures.

Author Oyeronke Oyewumi reveals an ideology of biological determinism at the heart of Western social categories-the idea that biology provides the rationale for organizing the social world. And yet, she writes, the concept of “woman,” central to this ideology and to Western gender discourses, simply did not exist in Yorubaland, where the body was not the basis of social roles.

Oyewumi traces the misapplication of Western, body-oriented concepts of gender through the history of gender discourses in Yoruba studies. Her analysis shows the paradoxical nature of two fundamental assumptions of feminist theory: that gender is socially constructed and that the subordination of women is universal. The Invention of Women demonstrates, to the contrary, that gender was not constructed in old Yoruba society, and that social organization was determined by relative age.

A meticulous historical and epistemological account of an African culture on its own terms, this book makes a persuasive argument for a cultural, context-dependent interpretation of social reality. It calls for a reconception of gender discourse and the categories on which such study relies. More than that, the book lays bare the hidden assumptions in the ways these different cultures think. A truly comparative sociology of an African culture and the Western tradition, it will change the way African studies and gender studies proceed.