Abstract
Drawing from Achille Mbembe’s theorization of Afropolitanism as an opportunity for modern Africans “to experience several worlds” and develop flux, hybrid, and constantly mobile identities (“Afropolitanism” 29), this essay attempts to make an intervention into the ways in which this phenomenon appeared in colonial Senegalese culture. A neglected site of Afropolitanism was the colonial metropolis of Dakar which reflected subversive homosexual or transgender identities during the 1940s and 50s. Focusing on key writings such as Armand Corre’s book, L’ethnographie criminelle d’après les observations et les statistiques judiciaires recueillies dans les colonies françaises [criminal ethnography based on judiciary observations and statistics gathered from French colonies] (1894) and Michael Davidson’s travelogue, “Dakar” (1970), this essay wants to uncover a part of the silenced and neglected history of sexual and gender variances in colonial Senegalese culture. In these texts, one finds salient examples of Afropolitanism which were deployed as tools of resistance against homophobia and transphobia and as means of affirming erotic, sensual, and transgressive identities. In the end, colonial Senegalese culture transcended gender and sexual binaries in order to provide space for recognizing and examining Afropolitan sensibilities that have thus far been neglected in African studies scholarship.
Highlights
In recent years, Afropolitanism has become an increasingly popular theory in black cultural studies, inspiring new lenses in the study of African identities
By exploring Armand Corre’s book, L’ethnographie criminelle d’après les observations et les statistiques judiciaires recueillies dans les colonies françaises [criminal ethnography based on judiciary observations and statistics gathered from French colonies] (1894) and Michael Davidson’s travelogue, “Dakar” (1970), this essay aims to reveal the Afropolitanism that marginalized segments of Senegalese populations with variant gender and sexual identities embodied by affirming their status of creative, mobile, and open-minded Africans who were not limited by the colonial boundaries of race, culture, religion, nationality, caste, and class
As discussions of examples from these two writings suggest, Afropolitanism allowed colonial Senegalese communities to have the cultural backdrop for a sexual agency and the freedom to play with gender and sexuality
Summary
Afropolitanism has become an increasingly popular theory in black cultural studies, inspiring new lenses in the study of African identities. Like many other African nations, Senegal is rife with Afropolitanism that can be inventoried from precolonial to contemporary times Without examining this large history, this essay aims to explore a small part of it, namely, the Afropolitan sexual and gender identities that evolved in colonial Senegal during the late nineteenth century and, later, in 1949, when Michael Davidson, a British traveler, visited its town of Dakar. Later published in 1970 as “Dakar,” this travelogue is Afropolitan because it reveals the existence, in colonial Senegal, of a dissident, subversive, and creative black Senegalese transgender and homosexual culture that thrived on the fringes of the country’s capital city while interacting with a European clientele that was exploitative and denigrating toward people with non-normative gender. By exploring Armand Corre’s book, L’ethnographie criminelle d’après les observations et les statistiques judiciaires recueillies dans les colonies françaises [criminal ethnography based on judiciary observations and statistics gathered from French colonies] (1894) and Michael Davidson’s travelogue, “Dakar” (1970), this essay aims to reveal the Afropolitanism that marginalized segments of Senegalese populations with variant gender and sexual identities embodied by affirming their status of creative, mobile, and open-minded Africans who were not limited by the colonial boundaries of race, culture, religion, nationality, caste, and class
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