African intimacies : race, homosexuality, and globalization / Neville Hoad.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hoad, Neville Wallace, 1966-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Homosexuality--Africa.

Homosexuality.

Gay people--Africa--History.

Gay people.

History.

Africa--Social life and customs.

Africa.

Manners and customs.

Africa--Politics and government.

Politics and government.

AIDS (Disease)--Africa.

AIDS (Disease).

HIV infections--Africa.

HIV infections.

Physical Description:

xxxiii, 187 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2007]

Summary:

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. Head'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.

Contents:

African sodomy in the missionary position : corporeal intimacies and signifying regimes

Decolonizing the body : the African and African American in Wole Soyinka's The interpreters

Neoliberalism and the church : the World Conference of Anglican Bishops

White man's burden, white man's disease : tracking lesbian and gay human rights

The intellectual, the archive, and the pandemic : Thabo Mbeki's AIDS blues

An elegy for African cosmopolitanism : Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to our Hillbrow.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 165-177) and index.

ISBN:

0816649154

0816649162

OCLC:

67383783

Publisher Number:

9780816649150

9780816649167

Online:

Publisher description