MLA 2013 Boston – African Literatures Division (Nonguaranteed Session)

QUEER SEXUALITIES IN AFRICAN LITERATURES AND FILM.

This panel seeks papers that examine/theorize LGBTIQ issues in African literatures and film.  Africa, here, includes North and Sub-Saharan Africa.  Especially welcome are papers that explore how recent political events and controversies in Cameroon, Malawi, Uganda, Nigeria and Ghana produce new sites of reading or demand new agendas for deciphering the complexities of
African queer sexualities.   Since the appropriateness of the word queer for African sexualities is often questioned, papers may examine/propose alternative conceptualizations of the spaces of same-sex eroticisms in African everyday lives.

Possible topics include:

  • Theorizations and representations of LGBTIQ activism in Africa
  • Democracy, human rights and African sexualities
  • Theorizing African sexualities beyond/outside Western paradigms
  • Africa and the globalization of sexuality studies
  • African homosexualities and religion
  • Homosexualities and Nollywood
  • Colonialism, coloniality and African LGBTIQ intimacies
  • Anti-LGBTIQ violence
  • Pedagogies of/for African sexualities
  • Queering canonical texts
  • Constitutionalism and Anti-Homosexuality Bills
  • Crime and the representation of same-sex sexual practices
  • Same-sex marriage in African film/literatures
  • International relations and African LGBTIQ politics
  • African Diaspora and African LGBTIQ
  • The spaces of African homosocialities and their functions
  • African queer liberalisms?
  • African homonationalisms?
  • African heteronormativities?
  • Queerness and spatialities of the libidinal

Please send 300-word abstracts and CV to Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi at: taiwo.adetunji.osinubi@umontreal.ca by March 10.