Out in Africa

Same-Sex Desire in Sub-Saharan Literatures & Cultures
Erscheinungsjahr 2013
ISBN: 978-1-84701-082-7
Verlag: Boydell & Brewer

Buch, Englisch, 308 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 163 mm x 241 mm, Gewicht: 658 g

Homophobia is still rife and it remains dangerous and even life-threatening to be out in Africa, but Chantal Zabus here traces the range of representations of same-sex desire in Africa through historic and contemporary sources.

Homosexuality was and still is thought to be quintessentially 'un-African'. Yet in this book Chantal Zabus examines the anthropological, cultural and literary representations of male and female same-sex desire in a pan-African context from the nineteenth century to the present. Reaching back to early colonial contacts between Europe and Africa, and covering a broad geographical spectrum, along a north-south axis from Mali to South Africa and an east-west axis from Senegal to Kenya, here is a comparative approach encompassing two colonial languages (English and French) and some African languages.
Out in Africa charts developments in Sub-Saharan African texts and contextsthrough the work of 7 colonial writers and some 25 postcolonial writers. These texts grow in complexity from roughly the 1860s, through the 1990s with the advent of queer theory, up to 2010. The author identifies those texts thatpresent, in a subterraneous way at first and then with increased confidence, homosexuality-as-an-identity rather than an occasional or ritualized practice, as was the case in the early ethnographic imagination. The work sketchesout an evolutionary pattern in representing male and female same-sex desire in the novel and other texts, as well as in the cultural and political contexts that oppose such desires.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Zabus, Chantal

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies: Homosexualität, LGBTQ+
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Afrikanische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: To Make Things Perfectly Queer
Anthropological Wormholes: From Pederasts to Female Husbands
The Text that Dare not Speak its Name: Forging Male Colonial Intimacies
The School for Scandal: Missionary Positions & African Sexual Initiations
The Stuff of Desire: Boarding-School Girls, Plain Lesbians & Teenage Dykes
Apartheid, Queerness & Diaspora
Male & Female Mythologies
Conclusion: Trans Africa

Über Autor(innen)

Zabus, Chantal
Chantal Zabus is Chair of Comparative Postcolonial Literatures and Gender Studies at Université Paris 13-Sorbonne-Paris-Cité. She is author of Between Rites and Rights; The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel, and The Future of Postcolonial Literatures. She is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Postcolonial Text.

Chantal Zabus holds the IUF [Institut universitaire de France] Chair of Comparative Postcolonial Literatures and Gender Studies at the University Paris 13 and at the Universities Sorbonne-Paris-Cité, France I. She is author of Between Rites and Rights; The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel, and Tempests after Shakespeare.She is presently Editor-in-Chief of the on-line journal Postcolonial Text.