I. Introduction

With the proliferation and deepening of research on colonialism and decolonization across the world, it is becoming increasingly clear that colonial power was exercised not only through official judicial, political, and economic mechanisms, but that it has been asserted most insidiously at the intimate level of the body, sex, and familial relationships. Scholars from many different postcolonial contexts are showing that the seemingly neutral or “natural” idea(l) of family has been a powerful vehicle for the oppressive political, social, and symbolic reordering of colonized societies. John and Jean Comaroff, for example, write that the enshrinement of the heterosexual, monogamous, nuclear family in the social canon of Protestantism was to assure that it would become a vital part of the civilizing mission to “undomesticated” savages abroad and that “few things were to excite evangelists in southern African more than the ‘need’ to remove all vestiges of heathen kinship and family life” (Reference Comaroff and ComaroffComaroff and Comaroff 1991, 68). It is therefore becoming evident that the project of decolonization requires the critical interrogation of the kinship relations and family configurations that we subscribe to, sanction, and enforce in our societies and those that we prohibit or condemn.

However, on the African continent, in spite of the growing knowledge of the colonial meanings that infuse the nuclear family form and the colonial aims served thereby, we are seeing a heightened idealization, and enforcement, of the heterosexual nuclear family model. In a strange twist of logic, sexual and familial practices and relationships that do not conform to heteropatriarchal conjugality are often condemned as “unAfrican.” These hegemonic gender and sexuality norms find their way into policy and legal frameworks resulting in their implicit and explicit formalization.Footnote ¹ Homosexuality is particularly harshly rejected in various African contexts as a form of Western imperialism that threatens African cultures and traditions (see Reference CampbellCampbell 2003; Reference Mkhize, Bennet, Reddy and MoletsaneMkhize et al. 2010; Reference NjidoNjido 2012). This starkly contradicts the ample research showing that sexuality and sexual identities took on various nonheterosexual and nonbinary forms in precolonial African societies (see, for example, Reference Nkabinde, Morgan, Morgan and WieringaNkabinde and Morgan 2005; Reference EpprechtEpprecht 2008).

In this article I explore through a philosophical lens the immense influence that kinshipFootnote ² norms exercise in the conditioning of societies and the making of human life. As a starting point for this analysis (in part II of this article) I look at the place that kinship norms take in Western thought, and Judith Butler's feminist critique thereof in her book Antigone's Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (Reference ButlerButler 2000). Western feminist thought has a long tradition of criticizing the different ways in which patriarchal power is asserted through the seemingly neutral ideal of family. Butler approaches this topic through a philosophical critique of kinship as it is theorized in the Western philosophical tradition. Western thought (Hegel through to Lacan and beyond) regards certain conceptions of kinship as prepolitical, timeless, and elevated to the status of elementary structures of intelligibility. 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. Butler calls on us to ask to what political ends kinship is being symbolically limited to sanction only certain gendered lives, to the sometimes‐fatal detriment of others. Although Butler provides an excellent gender analysis, she is silent on the major racial, cultural, and colonial implications of the problematic she is engaging with.

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 (part III of this article). I look in detail at the work of Oyèrónké Oyĕwùmí (part IV), who in her research 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 by Western thought. Oyĕwùmí's work can be argued to powerfully show the enduring colonial (and therefore political) implications of the symbolic constraints under which livability is established through dominant kinship norms rooted in Western culture and thought. To become human requires participation in the family in its normative sense, which is shaped by colonial modernity and serves patriarchy, empire, and capital. 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. I argue that Oyĕwùmí's work shows that by conserving and perpetuating the hold of Western normalized and universalized kinship norms on postcolonial African societies, we are not only complicit in rendering certain gendered lives unlivable, but also of sustaining the colonial organization of history and society by expelling entire cultural worlds to the outside of time on account of their difference from the Western Oedipal norm.

II. Judith Butler and Antigone's Challenge to the Symbolic Foreclosure of Livable Lives

In her book Antigone's Claim: Kinship between Life and Death, Butler rereads Sophocles's play Antigone to see what it means for feminist theory today. By scrutinizing the readings of this play by G. W. F. Hegel and Jacques Lacan, Butler shows how Western philosophy (and also popular culture, social theory, and feminist thought flowing therefrom) has conceived of kinship as something separate from, although dependent on, the social (Reference ButlerButler 2000).

Lacan's and Hegel's positions differ, but for both of them kinship plays a crucial role in the founding and shaping of culture and society. For both of them kinship gives rise to unmalleable norms that condition our world. For Hegel, in his discussion of Antigone in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Reference HegelHegel 1977, 266ff), kinship is figured at the limit of the ethical order (the sphere that legitimates the articulated norms that govern the sphere of cultural intelligibility, therefore the sphere of political participation but also of viable cultural norms). The social/ethical is inaugurated through a violent supercession of kinship.

According to Lacan, in his reading of Antigone in Seminar VII (Reference Lacan and MillerLacan 1992, 243–90), kinship is an enabling linguistic structure because it instantiates certain kinship relations as symbolic norms. For Lacan (based on the work of Claude Lévi‐StraussFootnote ³ before him), the symbolic is a structure of communicability and intelligibility that informs the social order. The symbolic is not based on natural or biological “truths,” but institutes the structure of kinship in ways that are regarded as equally unchangeable. Based on the primary prohibition against incest, kinship relations are structured by certain symbolic “positions” within the family according to an exogamic mandate. Family members are positioned in crossed sexual relations determined by the prohibition of incest, so that “a mother is someone with whom a son and daughter do not have sexual relations, and a father is someone with whom a son and daughter do not have sexual relations, a mother is someone who only has sexual relations with the father, etc.” (Reference ButlerButler 2000, 18). For Lacan, kinship is a function of language rather than a socially alterable institution. Because language is not a socially alterable institution, kinship is not either. The symbolic is therefore defined in terms of a conception of linguistic structures that are irreducible to the social forms that language takes. This constitutes the basis for the distinction between symbolic and social accounts of kinship (Reference ButlerButler 2000, 20).

The similarity in Hegel's and Lacan's reading of the play is that Antigone is not seen as a political figure whose speech has political implications, “but rather as one who articulates a prepolitical opposition to politics, representing kinship as the sphere that conditions the possibility of politics without ever entering into it” (Reference ButlerButler 2000, 2). A dominant strand of Western thought therefore theorizes and understands kinship as an institution that sits at the basis of the social, in a deep and mostly unalterable way, insofar as it structures the rules that condition the intelligibility of the social. The implication is that certain conceptions of kinship are made timeless and elevated to the status of elementary structures of intelligibility, so that they become as unalterable as if kinship were regarded to be a biological, natural necessity (20). The pervasiveness of the belief in stable kinship norms that support culture's intelligibility is clear from the way in which social theory, popular culture, and politics evoke the heterosexual nuclear family (or something that resembles it in form) as the necessary bedrock of functional, (truly) human existence.

Whether Western philosophers like Hegel and Lacan try to explain and account for the profound effect that kinship has on society and the difficulty of changing kinship norms, or whether they take part in conditioning society to understand kinship norms as unalterable, is difficult to say. What can be said, however, is that these Western philosophers shine a light on the ingrained and unyielding nature of kinship norms, and the way in which discourses in popular culture, politics, and social theory assume the realm of kinship to exist somehow removed from our contingent, everyday social and political realities. This explains how the colonizer could enforce with so much conviction a specific set of kinship norms as a universal truth of human existence. And it also helps to account for the way in which today, these same colonial kinship norms that were absorbed into the African symbolic have the status of unalterable and necessary rules in African societies, regardless of sharply diverging social realities.

It is this assumption of the separation between symbolic kinship norms and our everyday social realities that Butler takes issue with. She argues that the infinite variety and contingency of the social expressions of kinship should be read as a contestation of the unalterability and timelessness of the cultural norms and kinship rules generated by the incest taboo, rather than reading this contingency as a necessary condition for an ideal form (as Lacan does) (Reference ButlerButler 2000, 44–45). She makes the point that the symbolic itself is the sedimentation of social practices, and that radical alterations in kinship demand a rearticulation of the structuralist presuppositions of psychoanalysis and contemporary gender and sexual theory (19). On this basis she argues that the relation between symbolic positions and social norms needs to be rethought, so that kinship norms can be understood in relation to contingent social norms at work (30).

Butler does not explain what exactly she understands the idealized norms of kinship to look like, but in her criticism of the idea of the inalterability of the idealized norms of kinship, she clearly also evokes the heterosexual, monogamous, nuclear family. She writes that she asks these questions at a time in which “kinship has become fragile, porous, and expansive” because of global displacement of people, divorce, and a proliferation in sexual orientations and sexual identities, among other things. She asks powerfully: “[w]hat will the legacy of Oedipus be for those who are formed in these situations, where positions are hardly clear, where the place of the father is dispersed, where the place of the mother is multiply occupied or displaced, where the symbolic in its stasis no longer holds?” (23).

Butler is not alone in her insistence on the alterability of symbolic rules. Working from within the framework of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Belgian‐French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray argues that the Western symbolic order is founded on the forgetting or erasure of the maternal feminine (Reference IrigarayIrigaray 1985). Unlike Lacan, who takes this particular discursive organization to be ahistorical and unchangeable, Irigaray asks what the conditions are for the undoing of the burial of the maternal feminine and the emergence of a feminine subject. In her work, Irigaray then envisions the possibility of an alternative to the patriarchal Western symbolic order. Irigaray's feminist philosophy, like Butler's work, therefore raises as a political issue the kinship norms instantiating the Western symbolic order, an issue that can be subjected to change, even if such change is very difficult to bring about.

Turning to the figure of Antigone, Butler looks to the possibility of articulating “new schemes of intelligibility” by dismantling normative versions of kinship that are posited as timeless truths (Reference ButlerButler 2000, 24–25). Butler argues that Antigone is “somewhat unthinkable” in the horizon of intelligibility in which she operates, because for her, symbolic positions have become incoherent (22). In this way the “reigning regimes of representation” are put into crisis, and Butler regards this as raising the question of what the conditions of intelligibility could have been through which Antigone's life would have been possible (24). Antigone's claim challenges the very terms of livability that are established by the reigning symbolic rules (54). Instead of understanding kinship as beyond the political, Butler therefore calls for an interrogation of the political power at work through kinship rules, a power that determines at a very fundamental level what kinds of lives people are allowed to live and the grounds for the communicability of such lives.

In her analysis, Butler focuses only on the implications of normalized kinship rules for gendered lives and compares, for example, the moral horror that incest compels in some to the revulsion expressed toward homosexuality, and the intense moral condemnation of “single parenting, or gay parenting, or parenting arrangements with more than two adults involved” (71). In the next sections I present the argument that in her critique of the symbolic foreclosure of gendered lives through normalized kinship norms, Butler presents only part of the picture. Postcolonial and decolonial research on the African continent and other previously colonized spaces reveals that the implications of normalized kinship rules of Western thought and society span beyond gender, insofar as these norms are employed as part of the racial logic through which African cultures are rendered unintelligible and African lives are rendered incommunicable.

III. Western Kinship Norms as Markers of Race and Apparatuses of Capitalist Expansion

The insight that the categories of race and gender are inextricably intertwined in the logic of colonialism and colonialityFootnote ⁴ has become fairly established. Scholars like Anne McClintock, Qwo‐Li Driskill, Maria Lugones, Greg Thomas, Sylvia Tamale, Pumla Dineo Gqola, and Mark Rifkin show in different ways and in different contexts that in the colony, discourses of sexuality are key to projects of racial formation, insofar as sexual otherness (or “sexual monstrosity”) marks racial otherness, and racial otherness implies sexual monstrosity (Reference McClintockMcClintock 1995; Reference DriskillDriskill 2004; Reference LugonesLugones 2007; Reference ThomasThomas 2007; Reference TamaleTamale 2008; Reference LugonesLugones 2010; Reference GqolaGqola 2015; Reference RifkinRifkin 2016). Many scholars, including Nakanyike Musisi, Roderick Ferguson, Amy Brandzel, and Mark Rifkin have been showing, in the context of various postcolonial societies, how the sexual otherness (which translates to and produces racial otherness) in the colony is measured against the standard of normalized Western forms of conjugal domesticity, so that whiteness becomes “a product of a particular kind of household” (Reference TawilTawil 1998, 101; see Reference Musisi, Allman, Geiger and MusisiMusisi 2002; Reference FergusonFerguson 2004; Reference BrandzelBrandzel 2016; Reference RifkinRifkin 2016). Conformity to certain kinship rules therefore becomes a mark of civilization, which finds expression in a certain form of conjugality, so that different forms of familial and gender organization betray deviance and monstrosity (associated with blackness and proving necessary inferiority). Tamale explains that the hegemonic sexual discourse and norms of the colonizers were entrenched in colonized societies through the criminalization of sexual “transgressions” through which the complexity of African sexualities is instrumentalized, controlled, and regulated by the patriarchal state (Reference TamaleTamale 2014, 162). American anthropologist Ann Stoler argues in this regard that one of the central fallacies on which colonial authority rested was that the boundaries separating colonized from colonizer were self‐evident and easily drawn (Reference StolerStoler 2002, 42). She argues that the markers of European identity and criteria for community membership were fluid, permeable, and historically disputed terrain (43). Inclusion or exclusion from the categories of “white” or “native” was determined with reference to the sexual, conjugal, and domestic life of both European colonials and their subjects (43). Accordingly, certain universalized and normalized colonial/modernFootnote ⁵ conjugal and kinship rules become a marker of race, a standard through which racial inferiorization is realized and that serves as a justification for the abuse of the newly constructed racial other.

Butler makes a similar point with regard to the contemporary American context in her book Frames of War when she writes how Islamic sexual mores and practices are posited as posing a threat to the prevailing Western cultural conditions of humanization and citizenship, which leads to their representation as less‐than‐human and serves as rationale for their torture and death (Reference ButlerButler 2009, 131).

For the colonizer, the nuclear family form, characterized by a hierarchical relationship between husband and wife and a rigid division of labor in terms of which man is enabled to be a productive citizen in the public sphere, while woman takes care of bodily needs in the private sphere, represents the kinship configuration that is paradigmatic of Western, civilized whiteness. The Comaroffs write in this regard that by the mid nineteenth century, “savagery” was measurable by “a lack of ‘natural’ familial connections, of deep homely affections centered on cultivated femininity” (Reference Comaroff and ComaroffComaroff and Comaroff 1997, 275). American gender scholar Sally Kitch argues in this regard that the nuclear family as standard of civilization gave rise to a system of racial classification and ranking through which male domination over women was a sign of cultural (and therefore racial) advancement, or middle‐class gentility (Reference KitchKitch 2009, 56; see Reference Comaroff and ComaroffComaroff and Comaroff 1991, 68–69). This point is confirmed by a myriad of scholars who show that the domestication and disempowerment of women and the devaluation of their work was one of the first changes colonialism effected in many different African societies (see, for example, Reference Hanson, Allman, Geiger and MusisiHanson 2002; Reference Jackson, Allman, Geiger and MusisiJackson 2002; Reference Mianda, Allman, Geiger and MusisiMianda 2002; Reference Tashjian, Allman, Allman, Geiger and MusisiTashjian and Allman 2002).

Accordingly, in the colony, to become human requires participation in the family in its normative sense, which mostly takes the form of the white, heteropatriarchal nuclear family. The harmful effects of the nuclear family in the colony therefore exceed the sexism it entrenched in Western contexts. In the colony, the gender discrimination shouldered by the nuclear family form is employed in the shaping and justification of racist hierarchies, compounding the dehumanizing effect of Western kinship norms.

It is widely argued that the rules of heterosexual, monogamous nuclearity also form the foundation for the Eurocentric capitalist order. The Comaroffs explain in this regard that the nuclear family unit, with its spatial and gendered separation of “work” from “family,” was central to the social architecture of the capitalist order itself (Reference Comaroff and ComaroffComaroff and Comaroff 1991, 68).Footnote ⁶ The colonial imposition of Western kinship norms in the colonies should therefore also be considered in the context of modern European capitalist expansion. Zine Magubane argues, for example, with reference to South Africa specifically, that the transition to capitalism in the colonies was predicated on the “total transformation and devaluation of women's work” insofar as this facilitated the replacement of the subsistence economy by capitalist social relations (Reference MagubaneMagubane 2004, 27). Taking control of women's labor also allowed for a political reconfiguration of society as a whole because women's care work and domestic labor freed up a native male labor force in service of empire. Writing with reference to colonial Uganda, Carol Summers argues that by creating colonial families that centered on a new ideal of feminine maternity and adhered to certain modern/colonial sexual norms, the colonial state managed to secure and maintain a labor force, repress resistance, procure tax revenue, and shape colonial subjects that are in service of the empire (Reference SummersSummers 2002). Similarly, writing about Zimbabwe, feminist historian Elizabeth Schmidt highlights the connection between forceful assimilation into colonial/modern forms of conjugality in the colonies and the machinery of Western liberal capitalism (Reference SchmidtSchmidt 1991). Tamale writes that the form of patriarchy that capitalism required was distinctly different from the kinds of patriarchies that would have existed in precolonial African societies (Reference TamaleTamale 2014, 160). The patriarchy of Eurocentric capitalism is characterized by the fact that it is dependent on a very specific family form, namely a monogamous, nuclear, heterosexual family through which women's sexuality is controlled in order to ensure the patriarchal transference of wealth from the productive male citizen to his legitimate offspring (see also Reference ZaretzkyZaretsky 1976).

Haley McEwen argues that today's economic precarity on the African continent is the legacy of this manipulation of kinship systems through colonial land theft, entry into the wage labor system by men, and integration into the cash economy (Reference McEwenMcEwen 2017, 745). Ironically, today “pro‐family” advocates continue to posit the nuclear family (presented as the “natural” family form) as the key to unlocking neoliberal prosperity in Africa (745). The violent mechanisms used by empire to amass its own power and wealth is veiled through the representation of the nuclear family form as a natural and universal entity (747).

The work of these scholars shows that when Butler calls for the interrogation of the political power brandished through kinship rules, it is therefore necessary to look further than gender, to ask how the gendered foreclosures that Butler is concerned about are implicated in the creation and maintenance of a racist, colonial, Eurocentric capitalist world. African and postcolonial scholars show that the normalized rules of kinship that institute the Western symbolic order are actively employed in the racialization, inferiorization, and economic co‐optation of colonized peoples. The devastating implications that the normalized kinship rules of Western thought have for certain gendered lives are therefore radically compounded in the colony.

IV. Oyĕwùmí and the Alternate Horizon of Intelligibility of Precolonial Yorùbá Society

In her books The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses and What Gender is Motherhood: Changing Yorùbá Ideals of Power, Procreation, and Identity in the Age of Modernity (Reference OyĕwùmíOyĕwùmí 1997; Reference Oyĕwùmí2016), Oyĕwùmí poses a similar challenge to “universal” kinship norms and categories, as Butler reads Antigone to do. In other words, I interpret Oyĕwùmí's work as representing a way of being human that is somewhat unthinkable in the horizon of intelligibility in which she is speaking, and in this way, when taken seriously, provides a perspective on the symbolic constraints under which livability is established. Oyĕwùmí closely analyzes precolonial Yorùbá kinship and family forms and argues that “woman” is a Western cultural construct imposed on the Yorùbá colony. In what follows I show, first, how the society that she sketches is anchored in kinship rules and configurations that differ radically from the kinship norms that are assumed to be universal by Western thought, so that even the most taken‐for‐granted kinship categories lose their coherence. Second, I discuss Oyĕwùmí's arguments about the dehumanizing effects and devastating political consequences of the normalization and universalization of Western kinship norms on Yorùbá society. Lastly, I show how for Oyĕwùmí, the damage done by the normalization and universalization of Western gender and kinship norms goes further than the dehumanization and political disempowerment of the Yorùbá people, but works to achieve the epistemic erasure of entire cultural worlds, thereby rendering non‐Western cultural lives unintelligible and uncommunicable as human lives.

V. The Nuclear Family as Colonial Technology of Dehumanization and Political Oppression

Oyĕwùmí explains that where the Western gender system gives rise to, or finds expression in, the nuclear family, which is a “male‐dominant institution” built on a subordinate wife, her patriarchal husband, and their children (Reference OyĕwùmíOyĕwùmí 2002, 3), the ungendered scheme of societal organization of the precolonial Yorùbá people gives rise to, and is rooted in, the family‐as‐lineage system. This is a relational and fluid family structure in which entire lineages are joined, rather than a man and a woman. Power and status are determined with reference to the principle of seniority rather than gender, which renders them highly dynamic and relational, insofar as one can be the most senior in one context and the most junior in another. This is in contrast to a system that operates on the basis of gender, which designates a pre‐established and essentialist status that sticks to individual identity.

In Oyĕwùmí's comparison of the Western nuclear family to the extended family system of the Yorùbá, it becomes clear that these two family forms do not simply offer different ways of structuring kinship relations, but represent and support different ways of understanding the self and the world. Her work on Yorùbá gender and the family signals an order that operates according to radically different rules of what it means to be human. I read Oyĕwùmí's comparison between the Yorùbá family‐as‐lineage and the Western nuclear family as also implying the difference between the relational worldview prevalent in African thought, on the one hand (see, for example, Reference MbitiMbiti 1970; Reference KagameKagame 1976; Reference Menkiti and WrightMenkiti 1984; Reference WireduWiredu 1998; Reference Murungi and WireduMurungi 2005; Reference EzeEze 2009; Reference MasoloMasolo 2010), and the individualistic worldview characteristic of dominant strands of Western thought,Footnote ¹⁰ on the other. In line with the prevalent view of the subject in African philosophy, the precolonial Yorùbá relational subject that is shaped within the family‐as‐lineage system, as described by Oyĕwùmí, is fluid and is more than one thing at a time because it is determined by a multiplicity of dynamic kinship relationships. She writes that in precolonial Yorùbá society, subjectivity was not “individually based” and “self‐contained” (Reference OyĕwùmíOyĕwùmí 2016, 71) because “seniority, unlike gender, is relational and speaks to the collective ethos rather than to individual identity” (10). The nuclear family, on the other hand, is structured around the (implicitly masculine) individual, whose wife offers the material support for his emergence as an autonomous subject of reason (see, for example, Reference OkinOkin 1978; Reference PatemanPateman 1988). The colonial imposition of the nuclear family therefore also implies the imposition of an individualistic, dichotomous, and masculine‐biased world view and way of being in the world. The Comaroffs confirm this point with reference to the context of the colonial civilizing mission among the Tswana people of southern Africa, when they write that it was at the sites of matrimony and family that “the lessons of radical individualisms were most avidly taught; here that the ‘communal’ tendencies of ‘the’ African were most fiercely fought” (Reference Comaroff and ComaroffComaroff and Comaroff 1997, 375).

Oyĕwùmí's work can therefore be read to suggest that the colonial transformation of kinship configurations in Yorùbá society also reflects the injection of a different metaphysics in Yorùbá society and the erosion of indigenous relational constructions of subjectivity and the world. In this regard her work shows how, in the colony, the symbolic foreclosure of certain gendered ways of being that Butler highlights through her reading of Antigone constitutes only one level of the harm done by the imposition of normalized and universalized forms of kinship. Because kinship is in such a fundamental way tied to what is linguistically and culturally intelligible to us, the normalization and universalization of gendered Western kinship norms also lays down the racial and cultural rules for human self‐understanding. Here it is relevant that many African scholars write about the way in which European colonization of African was also “a persuasive attempt to colonize consciousness, to remake people” (Reference Comaroff and ComaroffComaroff and Comaroff 1991, 313), or a “transformation of African consciousness” (Reference Ndlovu‐GatsheniNdlovu‐Gatsheni 2013, 23; see also Reference MudimbeMudimbe 1988, 2). Ngugi wa Thiong'o writes that the biggest weapon of imperialism is how it manages to “annihilate a people's belief in their names” and makes them want to “identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves” (Reference NgugiNgugi 1981, 17). Oyĕwùmí's work suggests that the colonial reshaping of African gender and kinship relations was central to this process.

Oyĕwùmí's work also highlights the devastating, concrete political effects of the reordering of Yorùbá gender and kinship relations according to normalized kinship rules of Western society. She argues that the colonial imposition of Western kinship and gender norms was central to the colonial reordering of all spheres of life in Yorùbá society. She calls the division of society into gendered public and private spheres (a division central to the logic of the nuclear family) the “hallmark and symbol of the colonial process” (Reference OyĕwùmíOyĕwùmí 1997, 154) that had major consequences for governance of society, trade, and labor insofar as it resulted in a hierarchical and gendered division of labor and the disqualification of females from roles and positions that they had previously occupied, like rulers and traders. Reorganizing society in line with the requirements and norms attached to the nuclear family therefore was central to the political power wrought by the colonial authorities among the Yorùbá people insofar as it diffused indigenous power structures and political organization. This point should also be read in relation to the arguments of scholars like Zine Magubane (discussed above) about the relation between the colonial imposition of the nuclear family and the violent expansion of Eurocentric capitalism.

In Oyĕwùmí's work one therefore sees the Lacanian idea confirmed that how we are positioned toward our kin conditions society in the most fundamental way. However, Oyĕwùmí convincingly contests Western philosophy's positioning of kinship outside of the political. She shows how kinship structures played a profoundly political role in the colonial situation. Exactly because kinship shapes society in such a fundamental way, the colonial imposition of Western kinship norms could have such a ruinous effect on African societies: it undermined and eroded the way in which family, society, and politics were organized, and constituted an attack on the very self‐understanding of the African subject.

VI. Kinship and the Colonial Erasure of Worlds

To fully understand the implications of Oyĕwùmí's position, and how she moves far beyond Antigone's challenge as Butler understands it, it is crucial to note that she regards her work not to be about gender or kinship, but about epistemology. She is therefore not writing only a feminist text in which she describes alternative understandings of sexual and family organization. Rather, she wants to say something about how reality appears to us and how knowledges are produced. At the beginning of The Invention of Women, Oyĕwùmí cautions her reader that her book is not about the “woman question” because the “woman question” is an imported issue (and a specifically Western concept) that is not indigenous to the Yorùbá people (Reference OyĕwùmíOyĕwùmí 1997, ix). Rather, she investigates how “woman” came to exist in Yorùbá society and the “epistemological shift occasioned by the imposition of Western gender categories on Yorùbá discourse” (ix). She writes that “the first task of the study is to understand the epistemological basis of both Yorùbá and Western cultures” (ix). So rather than doing a study on gender, she unearths and investigates the “disciplinary theories and conceptual debates” that inform existing understandings of Yorùbá society and that informed colonial restructuring of Yorùbá society (ix). Oyĕwùmí argues that before it can be possible to do a study of gender in a Yorùbá locality, it is necessary to write a history of gender discourses in Yorùbá studies (xi). Rather than trying to provide a final and uncontested empirical account of “gender” and kinship in precolonial Yorùbá society, she questions the epistemological assumptions that frame our knowledge of the Yorùbá and that have shaped Yorùbá society through colonial rule and ongoing coloniality. She writes that “[t]his study, then, seeks to document why and how gender came to be constructed in the Yorùbá society of southwestern Nigeria… and how gender is constituted as a fundamental category in academic scholarship” (xi). Similarly, in the introduction to her latest book, What Gender is Motherhood, she states: “[t]his book aims to take endogenous categories and epistemologies seriously, focusing on the production of knowledge in the Yorùbá society of southwestern Nigeria and exploring the extent to which indigenous concepts, ideas, and language are taken into account in academic research” (Reference OyĕwùmíOyĕwùmí 2016, 1).

Oyĕwùmí approaches gender and kinship categories in Yorùbá society as being central to the process of a forceful epistemic shift brought about by colonialism. I read her work as a resistant response to the epistemic erasure of African worlds, cultures, and thought and the ways in which African peoples bring value and meaning into the world. Oyĕwùmí's work suggests that this erasure happens in at least two important ways.

First, by employing Western (gender and kinship) categories in our interpretation of African societies, and by the language that we use when we attempt such interpretation, knowledge about Africa is constructed through a European lens (Reference OyĕwùmíOyĕwùmí 1997, 11) and thereby erases the alternative constructions of African societies (16). On this basis, “Western theories become tools of hegemony as they are applied universally, on the assumption that Western experiences define the human” (16). For Oyĕwùmí this happens in the Yorùbá context when researchers interpret Yorùbá society through a gendered lens (based on Western cultural norms), without first establishing whether concepts like “man” and “woman” correspond to anything in Yorùbá society. The research that is generated through such loaded interpretations is distortive to the point of erasure.

Oyĕwùmí argues that there is no possibility for the Yorùbá to offer an alternative theoretical framework in which to understand gender, because the empirical research done in the Yorùbá context is only ever used to confirm the dominant Western understanding of gender. The Yorùbá context is therefore never approached as something in its own terms that gives rise to a legitimate theoretical position. Postcolonial scholar Dipesh Chakrabarty captures Oyĕwùmí's point very well when he writes (in a different context and not specifically with reference to Oyĕwùmí) that “[o]nly ‘Europe,’… is theoretically (that is, at the level of the fundamental categories that shape historical thinking) knowable; all other histories are matters of empirical research that fleshes out a theoretical skeleton that is substantially ‘Europe’” (Reference ChakrabartyChakrabarty 2000, 8). This point could also offer a lens through which to reflect on the different positionalities of Oyĕwùmí and Butler, and the implications thereof for the reception of their work. Although Oyĕwùmí and Butler are presenting comparable theoretical arguments about gender and kinship, Butler's insights are taken seriously by and integrated into feminist theory, whereas Oyĕwùmí remains on the margins of this field, not least because her research is most often weighed (and often dismissed) with reference to the question of its empirical contribution, rather than its radical theoretical content.Footnote ¹¹

A second form of epistemic erasure that Oyĕwùmí takes on in her work is effected by the temporal structure through which colonial modernity orders the world. She argues that the West understands itself as the pinnacle of modern civilization in terms of the modern colonial narrative of linear and unidirectional progress, and this results in the “erasure of African cosmologies, demonization of indigenous religion, destruction of institutions, Othering of persons, and… epistemicide” (Reference OyĕwùmíOyĕwùmí 2016, 4). Her point is that in terms of this modern/colonial rendition of history, societies that are different from the West (such difference being particularly powerfully expressed through alternate gender and kinship relations) are regarded as primitive and lagging behind the West so that the unique ideas and knowledges they contain are regarded as irrelevant.Footnote ¹² In other words, if we understand Western kinship norms as constituting cultural conditions of humanization (as Butler argues), and colonial modernity posits truly human life as something that unfolded or progressed through time, then lives lived in accordance with alternative kinship norms are rendered irrelevant or invisible on account of being less than human and existing behind in time, or outside of the present. As a result, Oyĕwùmí explains, “provincializing the West”Footnote ¹³ is “an epic struggle” because the alternative knowledges and epistemologies that would pose a challenge to the universality of Western knowledges are erased (4).

When Oyĕwùmí therefore describes the alternative kinship structures of the Yorùbá people, she is not only, like Antigone, trying to articulate a possibility that the kinship rules structuring the Western symbolic foreclose, she is also articulating something that is displaced out of history, buried alive in what colonial modernity effaces as amorphous and irrelevant prehistory.Footnote ¹⁴ Oyĕwùmí's critique of the normalization and universalization of certain kinship norms therefore reveals a further dimension of symbolic foreclosure occasioned thereby: namely the way in which certain racial or cultural lives are rendered unfathomable and obscure through the way in which the normalized and universalized kinship norms of Western thought are regarded to mark progress in a single, unilinear movement of history through which rational human life unfolds. The result is that through the normalization of a specific set of kinship norms, certain lives are not only rendered unlivable, but entire worlds are banished to the outside of time on account of their difference from the Western Oedipal norm.

VII. Toward a Theory of Decolonization as Project of Radical Sexual Emancipation

Oyĕwùmí is presenting a radically different scheme of intelligibility that, as Butler says of Antigone, “upsets the vocabulary of kinship that is the precondition of the human” (Reference ButlerButler 2000, 82). Although she does not try to describe the subject of precolonial Yorùbá in any specific terms, Oyĕwùmí challenges us to imagine the possibility of human life shaped beyond the dominant Western (now global) paradigm in terms of which the world is fragmented into hierarchically ordered dualisms; where difference is expressed as degeneration or deviation; and where “[d]ifferences and hierarchy… are enshrined on bodies; and bodies enshrine differences and hierarchy” (Reference OyĕwùmíOyĕwùmí 1997, 8).

Like Antigone, Oyĕwùmí raises the possibility of other ways of structuring the rules for a livable life, and highlights the contingency of the set of rules that we currently regard as necessary and unmalleable. However, I have argued in this article that Oyĕwùmí (and other African feminist scholars like Amadiume) are writing against more forces than Antigone had to contend with. The first set of forces are the reigning kinship rules instantiating the Western colonial/modern symbolic through which the gendered, racial, and cultural lives of colonized people are rendered unintelligible and uncommunicable. The second is the fact that the alternative kinship rules and resulting forms of life that Oyĕwùmí is describing are also effaced by the temporal logic of coloniality, which pushes these forms of life back in time and banishes them to prehistory. This means that a scholar like Oyĕwùmí, when she asserts that Yorùbá society operated according to a radically different kinship logic, is speaking up against the symbolic constraints instantiated by the colonial/modern kinship rules and against history or time, because coloniality denies the coevalness of different worlds (marked by kinship norms that deviate from the Western Oedipal norm) and works to bury the reality she is sketching in the recesses of what is represented as the shapeless past of the dark continent.

Oyĕwùmí thus provides us with at least three crucial insights regarding the role of the imposition of Western normalized and universalized kinship norms in the colony. First, her work on the Yorùbá strikingly refutes the idea that there exists one set of kinship rules that structures language and cultural intelligibility universally. Second, her work attests to the fact that through perpetuating colonial/modern family forms in African postcolonial contexts, we are not only sustaining anachronistic Eurocentric norms in African societies with devastating results for gendered lives as well as damaging economic and political impact, we are also sustaining a violent interference with and attack on culturally specific forms of subjectification, metaphysical self‐understanding, and collective being in the world. Lastly, this also results in the maintenance of the linear paradigm of coloniality in terms of which there exists only one legitimate way of being human.

It can therefore be said that the effects of the normalization and universalization of certain rules of kinship are much more far‐reaching and destructive than what Butler gives thought to in her reading of Antigone. Although the concern that Butler expresses about the symbolic foreclosure of certain gendered lives is crucial, it represents only one level of the damage done when being human is rendered universally contingent on conformity to a certain form of (violently imposed) family life.

In her book Butler argues that Antigone can be read to raise the question what the conditions of intelligibility could have been through which Antigone's life would have been possible (Reference ButlerButler 2000, 24). I read Oyĕwùmí's work as posing a much more radical question: what worlds would become possible, in what new ways can we become human, if we free kinship from a single symbolic horizon?