140201 VO Race, Gender and Sexuality in African Literature (2011S)

This course will explore the many ways in which "race" and "gender" have come into being through each other and governed political identities and relationships in colonial and postcolonial Africa, as reflected in African anglophone literature of the last 100 years. "Race" and "gender" will be seen as interchangeable terms in the patriarchal enterprise of colonialism and the resistance against it, and as over-loaded concepts that continue to impact upon the understanding of what it means to be "African". Topics to be discussed include the gendered imagination of imperial adventure novels; the marginalization of femininity by both colonial and African nationalist discourses; feminist rewritings of African nationalism; the sexualized perception of mixed-raced identities in southern Africa; the pathologization of gay sexuality across Africa; the identity of women in Islamic Africa; and the sexualization and commodification of the African female body in the West. Through the trope of dissident desire, the creolisation and hybridity of culture and identity in Africa will be analyzed in all of its meanings, both positive and negative. Desire will be explored as both a destructive force and a boundary-breaking energy that can redefine both the body and the nation through an imaginary encounter with otherness.