Querying Queer African Archives: Methods and Movements

Abstract

introductionThe as both repository and methodological concept has spawned increasing interdisciplinary exchanges, fueled by the development of digital forms of production. The has spurred further debates inspired by Michel Foucault's definition of the as system of discursivity (1982, 129) and Jacques Derrida's postmodern musings on archive fever (1996) as central the politics of individual and collective memory, desire, and interpretation.1 In mining various literary, performative, and visual materials and sexual subcultures, Ann Cvetkovich (2003) and Jack Halberstam (2005) in particular have stressed the importance of recovering queer archive of feelings that accounts not only for the past trauma of queer lives but also for the repression, ephemerality, and often spectral traces of queer experiences.Although some scholars have written on the and traditions of African same-sex practices, systematic and meticulous archival work on that topic has remained limited. In his research on male homosexuality in South African compounds and prisons at the turn of the twentieth century, Zackie Achmat, in his genealogical attempt to recover from the archives series of local knowledges for queers in contemporary South paved the way for other scholars engage in similar research (1993, 108). Marc Epprecht notably has worked on uncovering a pan-regional, proto-queer identity firmly rooted in history in southern Africa while acknowledging the many obstacles encountered in the process, from the silence or destruction of historical sources and documents, the prejudices laced with such accounts (2004, 4). Other historians have tackled the multidimensional complexity of archival work on the African continent, specifically South Africa, using feminist and social lens that highlights the controversial status of queer African archives (Hamilton et al. 2002; Mangcu 2011).The study of queer archives in African contexts is further problematized by number of indigenous and exogenous factors. The archival hubris of the colonial enterprise, intent on superimposing its own imperial of knowledge and fantasy, has jeopardized access African records and histories (Richard 1993). The colonial homophobia fostered by British antisodomy laws, for example, contributed the reinvention of the continent as hotbed of sexual perversions, which obscured indigenous same-sex in different ethnic groups. For Keguro Macharia, the political homophobia deployed by government leaders in countries like Cameroon, Uganda, and Nigeria has prompted activists engage in queer archival work: This turn the also subtends sexual minority organising in Africa: against claims that homosexuality is 'un-African,' activists, artists, and intellectuals have attempted produce archival evidence of same-sex acts in African pasts (2015, 141). Conversations about the role of archives in gender- and sexual-diversity organizing generate questions about such archives' goals. For instance, Western queer archivization of African lives may be motivated by ethnocentric taxonomies and identity politics, undermining African scholars and activists' own work of restoration (Epprecht 2008). In addition, theories of the queer deployed in the U.S. academy have had limited methodological applicability queer African archives, which require different understandings of temporality and subjectivity and should be approached with sense of urgency heightened by the necropolitics of homophobia enforced by some African leaders (Mbembe 2001, 2003).Our goal is not (re)locate same-sex or retrieve queer African agency from the past. Rather, we probe the discourses and best practices that can be implemented uncover queer African archives, broadly defined as methods and movements. The ethical protocol guiding archival projects enables wider conceptualization of transnational queer that, rather than dwelling in the porous uncertainty of its past, remains actively connected both its political present and future. …