Queering the black Atlantic: transgender spaces in Akwaeke Emezi’s writing and visual art

Abstract

ABSTRACT The last two decades have witnessed an emergence of African queer representations in literature and the arts that have been framed as interventions in cultural politics and as expressions of dissent. In this vein, I contend that it is necessary to consider queerness and diaspora together in order to rethink Gilroy's black Atlantic. Another important pursuit since the publication of The Black Atlantic (1993) has been reclaiming the place of Africa and its broad cultural production, which was largely overlooked in Gilroy's Westernized discussion of modernity. This article thus explores the growth of African queer studies in African literature and film, and goes on to focus on Nigerian-born transgender writer and visual artist, Akwaeke Emezi. Their experimental videos and photographs use Igbo traditions as part of their own expression of a gender non-binary African self in the diaspora. In their essay, ‘Transition' (2018a), Emezi challenges Western notions of gender through an African lens and reclaims their indigenous beliefs from a decolonial perspective. In defining what it means to be transgender, Emezi posits the notion that they might be an ogbanje, a spirit child found in some African pre-colonial cultures that does not conform to Western ideas of gender. Likewise, in the critically acclaimed debut novel Freshwater (2018b), the artist draws in part from their own life to tell the story of Ada, a young Igbo and Tamil woman haunted by the ogbanje, offering a poetic account of gender transition through the polyphonic voices of spirits that inhabit the protagonist. Emezi’s combination of personal experience and art makes visible multiple African, diasporic, and gender identities in the black Atlantic.