Abstract
I AM HONORED to have the opportunity to respond to these articles as they traverse critical junctures that interest me deeply, particularly the links between religious studies, queer studies, and postcolonial studies. I elaborate further on my impressions of some of the points made in the articles, but I begin by confessing that I am not an expert on Africa. I worked in Kenya briefly as a law intern at the Kenya Human Rights Commission in the early 2000s, and my experience was humbling. Seeing the ways in which Kenyans had mastered the language of human rights to ensure the flow of donor dollars was eye opening to a young aspiring lawyer enchanted by Africa. My training in law school and at NGOs in North America taught me that human rights talk abjured “charity” in favor of “capacity building” and “cultural transformation.” But the realities on the ground, as is often the case, differed. For many in Kenya, the civil sector was a powerful secondary economy, offering jobs and security available only to those that spoke a particular language, which would allow a cause to be heard internationally. The differences between my encounter of rhetoric and the reality are exceptionally illustrated by Marcel de Certeau's distinction between “strategies” and “tactics” ( de Certeau 1984 ). For de Certeau, “strategies” are the techniques of power, the means by which institutions and the powerful operate. Conversely, “a tactic is an art of the weak.” In the composite, tactics are “‘ways of operating’ [which] constitute the innumerable practice by means of which users reappropriate the space organized by techniques of sociocultural production” ( de Certeau 1984 : xiv).
Published Version
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