Here are 100 books that The Invention Of Women fans have personally recommended if you like
The Invention Of Women.
Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
As a Moldovan emigrant growing up in Greece, I believed that Western institutions were centers of excellent knowledge. After studying in the USA and the UK and conducting research with Muslim and Christian communities in Africa, I became aware of colonial, ethnocentric, and universalizing tendencies in gender, religion, and domestic violence studies and their application in non-western contexts. International development had historically followed a secular paradigm congruent with Western societies’ perception of religion and its role in society. My work has since sought to bridge religious beliefs with gender analysis in international development work so that the design of gender-sensitive interventions might respond better to domestic violence in traditional religious societies.
Saba Mahmood’s book is an intellectually stimulating and insightfully written study of a grassroots women’s mosque movement in Cairo, Egypt.
Speaking to a North American audience, Mahmood challenged secular-liberal theorizations of human agency and views that depicted Muslim women in patriarchal societies as without agency. Her nuanced and multi-dimensional study evidenced a considerably more complex picture of moral choice, agency, and Islamist politics that centered on the women’s own understandings and interpretation of a complex religious and political landscape.
It is Mahmood’s balanced and reflexive approach that makes this book a deeply educational study for students and scholars alike.
Politics of Piety is a groundbreaking analysis of Islamist cultural politics through the ethnography of a thriving, grassroots women's piety movement in the mosques of Cairo, Egypt. Unlike those organized Islamist activities that seek to seize or transform the state, this is a moral reform movement whose orthodox practices are commonly viewed as inconsequential to Egypt's political landscape. Saba Mahmood's compelling exposition of these practices challenges this assumption by showing how the ethical and the political are indelibly linked within the context of such movements. Not only is this book a sensitive ethnography of a critical but largely ignored dimension…
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
As a Moldovan emigrant growing up in Greece, I believed that Western institutions were centers of excellent knowledge. After studying in the USA and the UK and conducting research with Muslim and Christian communities in Africa, I became aware of colonial, ethnocentric, and universalizing tendencies in gender, religion, and domestic violence studies and their application in non-western contexts. International development had historically followed a secular paradigm congruent with Western societies’ perception of religion and its role in society. My work has since sought to bridge religious beliefs with gender analysis in international development work so that the design of gender-sensitive interventions might respond better to domestic violence in traditional religious societies.
Laura McClusky’s investigation of conjugal abuse among a Mayan community in Belize is one of the most ethnographically compelling books I have read on lived experiences of domestic violence.
McClusky was motivated to write this book because most domestic violence research had been clinical or sociological and had focused solely on the experience of violence, often approaching the phenomenon in a “peopleless manner.”
Refreshingly, McClusky decided to focus on the emotions, desires, motivations, and personal experiences of living women more holistically, thus overcoming tendencies to reduce women to the experience of violence and granting them the recognition as agents of actions that they deserve.
Marriage among the Maya of Central America is a model of complementarity between a man and a woman. This union demands mutual respect and mutual service. Yet some husbands beat their wives. In this pioneering book, Laura McClusky examines the lives of several Mopan Maya women in Belize. Using engaging ethnographic narratives and a highly accessible analysis of the lives that have unfolded before her, McClusky explores Mayan women's strategies for enduring, escaping, and avoiding abuse. Factors such as gender, age inequalities, marriage patterns, family structure, educational opportunities, and economic development all play a role in either preventing or contributing…
As a Moldovan emigrant growing up in Greece, I believed that Western institutions were centers of excellent knowledge. After studying in the USA and the UK and conducting research with Muslim and Christian communities in Africa, I became aware of colonial, ethnocentric, and universalizing tendencies in gender, religion, and domestic violence studies and their application in non-western contexts. International development had historically followed a secular paradigm congruent with Western societies’ perception of religion and its role in society. My work has since sought to bridge religious beliefs with gender analysis in international development work so that the design of gender-sensitive interventions might respond better to domestic violence in traditional religious societies.
I read Nzegwu’s book after completing my PhD and it left a lingering impression on me.
Her work effectively challenged conceptualizations of gender that assumed an inherently hierarchical relationship between female and male. It also drew attention to the role of colonial laws and judicial edicts in promoting gender inequality in Nigeria’s Igbo society.
Nzegwu's discussion of the Onitsa dual-sex system that had historically embraced sexual difference but still granted women and men respective powers and responsibilities in society told a different story about gender relations in African societies prior to Western colonialism.
Nzegwu’s work echoes Oyěwùmí’s, and together they offer a window into alternative gender realities we can learn from.
At five years old, Kasiel was found with the pointed ends of his ears cut off. Despite that brutal start, he’s lived twelve peaceful years with the man who took him in. Keeping his hair long over his mutilated ears helps him hide the fact that he is Vanrian, a…
As a Moldovan emigrant growing up in Greece, I believed that Western institutions were centers of excellent knowledge. After studying in the USA and the UK and conducting research with Muslim and Christian communities in Africa, I became aware of colonial, ethnocentric, and universalizing tendencies in gender, religion, and domestic violence studies and their application in non-western contexts. International development had historically followed a secular paradigm congruent with Western societies’ perception of religion and its role in society. My work has since sought to bridge religious beliefs with gender analysis in international development work so that the design of gender-sensitive interventions might respond better to domestic violence in traditional religious societies.
Talal Asad’s genealogical analysis of the concept of religion in Western thought is a classic.
Asad, a Saudi-born anthropologist, proposed that it was the unique product of Western modernity and secularism to perceive religious discourse in the public arena as a disguise for power, which created a bias towards it in public life. This bias was then internationalized through the transposition of an inherently ethnocentric concept of religion.
Among other insights, Asad stressed the need to approach religious traditions in reference to the experience of the believers and the texts or traditions they invoke in their everyday life. A seminal piece of work that can provide a point of reference for anyone working to decolonize religious studies.
In "Geneologies of Religion", Talal Asad explores how religion as a historical category emerged in the West and has come to be applied as a universal concept. The idea that religion has undergone a radical change since the Christian Reformation-from totalitarian and socially repressive to private and relatively benign-is a familiar part of the story of secularization. It is often invokved to explain and justify the liberal politics and world view of modernity. And it leads to the view that "politicized religions" threaten both reason and liberty. Asad's essays explore and question all these assumptions. He argues that "religion" is…
I was born and raised in Benin City, Nigeria, surrounded by storytellers who offered me a healthy diet of oral, written, and visual tales. I grew up fascinated with stories of all kinds, especially the fantastic. When I began to tell my own stories, I gravitated toward the speculative, returning to where I first learned about stories. My novels David Mogo, Godhunter and Son of the Storm offer glimpses into the way I braid history and speculation. I have an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona, and am currently a professor of the same at the University of Ottawa in Ontario, where I live.
Let’s start from the beginning, why don’t we? Any list of fantasy by authors of African descent would, in my opinion, be incomplete without the inclusion of the original oral tales of fantastic beings and events that sparked our imaginations.
Ògbójú Ọdẹ nínú Igbó Irúnmọlẹ̀, the Yoruba-language novel (published in 1938, and translated by Wole Soyinka in 2013 to become Forest of a Thousand Daemons) features the hallmarks of what we’ve come to love in contemporary fantasy: monsters and battles, spellbinders and royalty, warriors and heroes, all presented like the campfire tale that it is.
I remember reading this and immediately regretting that I couldn’t experience it for the first time again. It’s that exhilarating.
"His total conviction in multiple existences within our physical world is as much an inspiration to some of the most brilliant fiction in Yoruba writing as it is a deeply felt urge to 'justify the ways of God to man.'"--Wole Soyinka, translator and Nobel Laureate A classic work of African literature, Forest of a Thousand Daemons is the first novel to be written in the Yoruba language. First published in Nigeria in 1939, it is one of that country's most revered and widely read works, and its influence on Nigerian literature is profound, most notably in the works of Amos…
I love reading adaptations of classics which complicate the original texts in interesting ways, I have just written one myself, The Middle Daughter. Transcultural adaptations, particularly remind us that we are all members of one human family, dealing with the same kind of problems across time and space and cultures. In these times of deepening polarization, it's important to see that there's more that unites us than not.
I read this play in high school, and then later, a university theatre group performed it at our school. It was one of the first plays I ever watched.
It’s a Yoruba (Nigerian) adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (and was in fact my introduction to Oedipus Rex) with Yoruba gods replacing the Greek ones, and like Oedipus Rex is a powerful commentary on how inescapable fate is.
In this play, the theme of Sopocles' "Oedipus Rex" is skillfully transplanted to African soil. King Odewale's progress towards knowledge of the murder and incest that must be expiated before his kingdom can be restored to ealth is unfolded with a dramatic intensity heightened by the richness of the play's Nigerian setting. It had its first performance in Nigeria at the Ife Festival of the Arts in 1968, has since been staged with great success in other West African countries, and was awarded the first prize in the African Arts/Arts d'Afrique playwriting contest in 1969.
Resonant Blue and Other Stories
by
Mary Vensel White,
The first collection of award-winning short fiction from the author of Bellflower and Things to See in Arizona, whose writing reflects “how we can endure and overcome our personal histories, better understand our ancestral ones, and accept the unknown future ahead.”
I was born in Africa and have been infatuated with its history and cultures all my life. Of the 48 countries sharing the African mainland, I have spent time in all but four. True, a few only for a laughably brief stay (I wandered across the Cameroon-Equatorial Guinea border once by mistake, not knowing I had crossed; there was no sign of a border post or any guards. I stayed only for the rest of the day, never leaving the beach, before wading back to Cameroon.) But others I have lived in for years, and have travelled extensively to famous and obscure regions alike, especially in the Sahel.
All right, so a Nobel laureate doesn’t need any encomiums from me, but what the hell. Soyinka’s first book in nearly half a century is revealing, enlightening, satirical, gleeful and just plain damn funny, while telling you more about the chaotic politics and sociology of his native Nigeria than you ever thought possible, a wonderful window into Africa’s most populous country.
'Soyinka's greatest novel ... No one else can write such a book' - Ben Okri
'A lion of African literature' - Financial Times
'Chronicles is many things at once: a caustic political satire, a murder mystery, a conspiracy story and a deeply felt lament for the spirit of a nation' - Juan Gabriel Vasquez, New York Times
A FINANCIAL TIMES AND SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR
To Doctor Menka's horror, some cunning entrepreneur has decided to sell body parts from his hospital for use in ritualistic practices. Already at the end of his tether from the horrors he routinely sees…
I was born in Africa and have been infatuated with its history and cultures all my life. Of the 48 countries sharing the African mainland, I have spent time in all but four. True, a few only for a laughably brief stay (I wandered across the Cameroon-Equatorial Guinea border once by mistake, not knowing I had crossed; there was no sign of a border post or any guards. I stayed only for the rest of the day, never leaving the beach, before wading back to Cameroon.) But others I have lived in for years, and have travelled extensively to famous and obscure regions alike, especially in the Sahel.
This is far more than a colonial era whodunit, a recounting of yet another colonial atrocity – though it is that in spades. Yes, in 1897 the British occupation army reacted to the killing of a a few colonial officials by razing an empire to the ground, careless of its causes and its effects. So much, so commonplace. But what an empire! The Benin artworks the army looted, subsequently dispersed to museums around the globe, were and still are a revelation to those whose notions of African art were to that point limited to masks and fetishes. A mere catalogue of the pieces would be enough to explain why Picasso, among other artists, was captivated by the art of Africa, but Philips has done more than that – he puts the looted artifacts into their context and into their culture. There is nothing didactic or preachy about this book, but…
'Compelling...humane, reasonable, and ultimately optimistic.' Evening Standard
'[A] valuable guide to a complex narrative.' The Times
In 1897, Britain sent a punitive expedition to the Kingdom of Benin, in what is today Nigeria, in retaliation for the killing of seven British officials and traders. British soldiers and sailors captured Benin, exiled its king and annexed the territory. They also made off with some of Africa's greatest works of art.
The 'Benin Bronzes' are now amongst the most admired and valuable artworks in the…
I’m tired of playing by the rules of a game I’m not allowed to win. I’m tired of being bound to a standard of being in the world that we know isn’t working but are too scared to confront head-on. I’m tired of being told to beat around the bush when pruning it, uprooting it, or burning it altogether would serve it better. I reject the tenet of white supremacy that claims a constant right to comfort. Brave and honest discourse matters. Our commitment to each other and to the future of every single creature on this earth matters. Bring on the badasses who love passionately, laugh loudly, and live bravely.
When the world ends, who will you turn to? For me, I’d turn to someone like Kainene in this book. Kainene isn’t beautiful, doesn’t play by the ridiculous rules of the feminine mystique, and is righteously bitter about a lot of things in her life. She’s also a guileless straight shooter people can count on, to tell the truth in any situation. That truth is never sugar-coated; it’s exactly what the characters in her life need to hear.
I love the bravery of her choice to keep her innermost thoughts private. I admire how steadfast she holds on to her commitment to what she believes will be a better future.
Winner of the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2007, this is a heartbreaking, exquisitely written literary masterpiece
This highly anticipated novel from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is set in Nigeria during the 1960s, at the time of a vicious civil war in which a million people died and thousands were massacred in cold blood.
The three main characters in the novel are swept up in the violence during these turbulent years. One is a young boy from a poor village who is employed at a university lecturer's house. The other is a…
After her mother is killed in a rare Northern Michigan tornado, Sadie Wixom is left with only her father and grandfather to guide her through young adulthood. Miles away in western Saskatchewan, Stefan Montegrand and his Indigenous family are displaced from their land by multinational energy companies. They are taken…
I’ve taught English for 20 years and the novels I’ve enjoyed teaching most – because the students have enjoyed them most – are those with the first-person perspectives of young narrators. These characters’ voices ring loud and clear as they learn, change, and grow, often suffering and having to find resilience and strength to survive. The limited perspective also takes us into the mind and heart of the protagonist, so that we feel all the feels with them. This is why I chose a first-person perspective for the narrator of my own book ‘Cuckoo in the Nest’: Jackie Chadwick is sarcastic, funny, and observant. Readers love her.
You know when you first go to someone else’s house and realise that not every family lives the way yours does?
It’s part of the coming-of-age process and can be both illuminating and destabilising. In Adichie’s story, set in post-colonial Nigeria, 15-year-old Kambili gets the chance to escape her wealthy but religiously-oppressive household and stay with her vibrant, liberal aunt.
I love the way Kambili’s narrative expresses the new freedom she feels there: she has a voice at last and the liberty to experience a sexual awakening. She needs these new strengths as her own family disintegrates into tragedy.
“One of the most vital and original novelists of her generation.” —Larissa MacFarquhar, The New Yorker
From the bestselling author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists
Fifteen-year-old Kambili and her older brother Jaja lead a privileged life in Enugu, Nigeria. They live in a beautiful house, with a caring family, and attend an exclusive missionary school. They're completely shielded from the troubles of the world. Yet, as Kambili reveals in her tender-voiced account, things are less perfect than they appear. Although her Papa is generous and well respected, he is fanatically religious and tyrannical at home—a home that…
