Search results for ""Author Chantal Zabus""

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.

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In the past five decades and over three generations, African women writers have introduced a new autobiographical discourse around their experience of excision that brings nuance to the Female Genital Mutilation debate. Spanning pharaonic times through classical antiquity to the onset of the twenty-first century, this unprecedented study shows how this experiential body of literature—encompassing English, Arabic, and French—goes far beyond such traditional topics as universalism and cultural relativism, by locating the female body as a site of liminality between European and African factions, subject and agent; consent and dissent; custom and human rights. Women across the African “excision belt” have broken away from the male discourses of anthropology and psychoanalysis and have fled from “the cult of culture” and from religious and patriarchal surveillance. These women have relocated their struggle to the West, where they seek empowerment and wrestle with the law. While showing the limits of autobiography, Between Rites and Rights boldly interweaves Freudian hysteria, the surgical age, the world of high fashion, male circumcision’s “fearful symmetry,” and Western body modification.

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