Carmen Goes Postcolonial, Carmen Goes Queer: Thinking the Postcolonial as Queer

Abstract

Karmen Gei (2001) by Senegalese filmmaker Joseph Gai Ramaka is the first African adaptation of Carmen. The film garnered attention for its indulgent sexuo-erotic rhetoric and its reinvention of Carmen as a bisexual libertine. Most critical assessments of Karmen Gei have accordingly applauded Joseph Gai Ramaka's ‘daring’ and ‘innovative’ intervention into the political and heteropatriarchal landscape of postcolonial Senegal, a country with a strong, increasingly radicalised, Moslem majority and a nascent yet burgeoning homophobia. Yet the peculiar trajectory outlined in the title of my essay, whereby Bizet's Carmen travels to the African postcolony and gets queered by/in the postcolonial moment, grounds the queer in the postcolonial and asserts that the queer is organic to the postcolonial. More precisely, the postcolonial adaptation of Bizet's Carmen offers a theoretical template for rethinking the interface between the postcolonial and the queer by showing how Carmen goes effortlessly if not inevitably queer in the postcolony as a result of intrinsic postcolonial modalities of power, resistance and subjectivity.