Suchergebnisse

There have been few book-length engagements with the question of sexuality in Africa, let alone African homosexuality. African Intimacies simultaneously responds to the public debate on the ÒAfricannessÓ of homosexuality and interrogates the meaningfulness of the terms ÒsexualityÓ and ÒhomosexualityÓ outside Euro-American discourse. Speculating on cultural practices interpreted by missionaries as sodomy and resistance to colonialism, Neville Hoad begins by analyzing the 1886 Bugandan martyrs incidentÑthe execution of thirty men in the royal court. Then, in a series of close readings, he addres

The guest editors of a special issue of Race & Class 60 no. 3 (2019), 'Solidarity here and everywhere: the lifework of Barbara Harlow', provide a short biography of Harlow and discuss her key works: Resistance Literature; Barred: women, writing and political detention; and After Lives: legacies of revolutionary writing. They explain the importance of her work as 'a critic of both the world and the text' across disciplines, in establishing new fields of study, and as a reviewer. A symposium in October 2017 of former students had commemorated her path-breaking work in terms of decolonisation, imperialism and literature. Two of Harlow's unfinished book projects – on anti-apartheid activist Ruth First and on the challenges of drone warfare – as well as tributes from those who had been influenced by her teaching are flagged up. The authors explain why they choose the phrase 'solidarity here and everywhere' from Edward Said to title the issue.

This introduction outlines the idea of the queer customary and how various African articulations of it engage, contest, and nuance central concerns of queer theory produced in the global North, particularly around ideas of normativity—hetero and homo. It speculates on the customary's reworking of temporality and what that reworking does to historical time and the problems and possibilities in reading the colonial archive in the search for a useable past for both lived African sexual and gendered experience and the academic study of it. The customary is seen as an iterative containment of ancestral time, a powerful form of self-fashioning in the present, and as an invitation to futurity. Brief framings of how the various essays in the special issue elaborate what we are calling the queer customary follow.