African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization - Softcover

Hoad, Neville

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0816649162 ISBN 13: 9780816649167

Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2007

Synopsis

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 “Africanness” of homosexuality and interrogates the meaningfulness of the terms “sexuality” and “homosexuality” 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 incident―the execution of thirty men in the royal court. Then, in a series of close readings, he addresses questions of race, sex, and globalization in the 1965 Wole Soyinka novel The Interpreters, examines the emblematic 1998 Lambeth conference of Anglican bishops, considers the imperial legacy in depictions of the HIV/AIDS crisis, and reveals how South African writer Phaswane Mpe’s contemporary novel Welcome to Our Hillbrow problematizes notions of African identity and cosmopolitanism.Hoad’s assessment of the historical valence of homosexuality in Africa shows how the category has served a key role in a larger story, one in which sexuality has been made in line with a vision of white Western truth, limiting an understanding of intimacy that could imagine an African universalism.Neville Hoad is assistant professor of English at the University of Texas, Austin.

About this title

Product Description

African Intimacies 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 "Africanness" of homosexuality and interrogates the meaningfulness of the terms "sexuality" and "homosexuality" outside Euro-American discourse. Speculating on cultural practices interpreted by missionaries as ... Full description

Synopsis

Hoad (English, U. of Texas-Austin) explores the changing discourse regarding the relationship between homosexuality and politics in Africa over the past century. Among his perspectives are African sodomy in the missionary position, the World Conference of Anglican Bishops, and Thabo Mbeki's AIDS blues. Annotation 2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Edition details

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0816649162
• ISBN 13: 9780816649167
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 232