A01=Chantal Zabus
Africa
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
anthropology
Author_Chantal Zabus
automatic-update
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DSBF
Category=DSBH
colonial contacts
COP=United Kingdom
culture
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
English
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
French
homophobia
Language_English
literature
PA=Available
pan-African
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
queer theory
same-sex desire
softlaunch
Product details
- ISBN 9781847010827
- Weight: 722g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 21 Nov 2013
- Publisher: James Currey
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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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.
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.
