Contested Borders: Queer Politics and Cultural Translation in Contemporary Francophone Writing from the Maghreb (Critical Perspectives on Theory, Culture and Politics) - Hardcover

William J. Spurlin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1786600811 ISBN 13: 9781786600813

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019

Synopsis

Contested Borders broadens understandings of dissident sexualities in Africa through focusing specifically on the Maghreb where gender/sexual politics have emerged under a different set of historical, material, and ideological conditions compared with sub-Sahara Africa, which has been the focus of much of the scholarship on African sexualities. It examines new representations of same-sex desire emerging in new francophone life writing, memoir, and literature from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, where long-established traditions pertaining to gender and sexuality are brought into contact with new forms of gender and sexual dissidence, resulting from the inflection of globally-circulating discourses and embodiments of queerness in Africa, and from the experience of emigration and settlement by the writers concerned in France. The book analyses how such writers as Rachid O., Abdellah Taïa, Eyet Chékib Djaziri, Nina Bouraoui, foreground translation and narrative reflexivity around incommensurable spaces of queerness in order to index their crossings and negotiations of multiple languages, histories, cultures. By writing in French, it argues that these writers are not merely mimicking the language of their former coloniser, but inflecting a European language with vocabularies and turns of phrase indigenous to North Africa, thus creating new possibilities of meaning and expression to name their lived experience of gender and sexual otherness―a form of (queer) translational praxis that destabilises received gender/sexual categories both within the Maghreb and in Europe.

About this title

About the Author

William J Spurlin is Professor of English and Director of Teaching and Learning for Arts & Humanities at Brunel University London. Previously, he was Professor of English at the University of Sussex and directed the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence & Cultural Change from 2006-2011. Professor Spurlin has written extensively on the politics of gender and sexual dissidence in Africa in his book, Imperialism within the Margins: Queer Representation and the Politics of Culture in Southern Africa (2006), which examines the politics of sexuality that emerged in the years following apartheid in South Africa; in numerous articles in academic journals, such as Research in African Literatures (forthcoming), Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism (2013), Feminist Review (2010), and Études Anglaises (2008); and as chapters in edited collections, most recently in The Future of Postcolonial Studies (2015), The Wiley Companion to Translation Studies (2014), and Gendering Border Studies (2010). His other monograph is Lost Intimacies: Rethinking Homosexuality under National Socialism (2009), and he has co-edited, with Jarrod Hayes and Margaret Higonnet, Comparatively Queer: Interrogating Identities across Time and Cultures (2010). Professor Spurlin chairs the Comparative Gender Studies Committee at the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA), and he is a Section Editor for the journal Postcolonial Text.

Edition details

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1786600811
• ISBN 13: 9781786600813
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256