In her book Antigone's Claim: Kinship between Life and Death, Judith Butler reads the figure of Antigone, who exists as an impossible aberration of kinship, as a challenge to the very terms of livability that are established by the reigning symbolic rules of Western thought (Butler 2000). In this article I extend Butler's argument to reach beyond gender. I argue that African feminist scholarship shows that the kinship norms shaping the reigning symbolic rules of Western thought not only render certain gendered lives unlivable, but through the gendered working thereof also become key to the colonial process of the racial dehumanization of the colonized and the violent expansion of Eurocentric capitalism. I show how Oyèrónké Oyĕwùmí, in her work on the Yorùbá people of Nigeria, provides, in a way analogous to Antigone, a glimpse of an order structured by kinship formations that are remarkably different from, and thereby bring into crisis, the normative versions of kinship that are posited as timeless truths. Through a reimagining or reconstruction of precolonial Yorùbá kinship formations, Oyĕwùmí articulates a different scheme of intelligibility, which enables radically different ways of being human and existing in the world.

中文翻译：

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安提戈涅，帝国与俄狄浦斯的遗产：通过重新确立亲属关系规则来思考非洲的非殖民化

朱迪思·巴特勒（Judith Butler）在她的《安提戈涅的主张：生与死之间的亲属关系》一书中，将安提戈涅的身影作为对亲属的不可能的畸变而存在，以挑战对由西方统治思想的统治规则所确立的宜居条件的挑战（巴特勒（2000）。在本文中，我将巴特勒的论点扩展到了性别之外。我认为非洲女权主义学者的研究表明，塑造西方思想统治性象征规则的亲属规范不仅使某些性别的生活变得不可行，而且通过性别化的工作，也成为殖民化和暴力种族非人化的殖民进程的关键。欧洲中心资本主义的扩张。我展示了OyèrónkéOyĕwùmí在她对尼日利亚约鲁巴人的研究中如何以类似于安提戈涅的方式提供，一眼看清由血缘关系构成的秩序，这种血缘关系与被定为永恒真理的血缘关系的规范版本显着不同，并因此陷入危机。通过重新构想或重建前殖民地约鲁巴族的亲属关系，奥伊武米提出了一种不同的可理解性方案，从而实现了人类和世界上存在截然不同的生活方式。