Law Could Lead to Genocide As I write this, I get a tweet. BradNYC wants me to know that this anti-gay law could easily lead to genocide.1 1 click the provided link, which takes me to the website for CNN and the headline Ugandan Antigay Measure Will Be Law Soon, Lawmaker Says (McKenzie 2010). Alarming to be sure, as is the video clip one can play immediately below, featuring the article's author, CNN's Nairobi-based correspondent David McKenzie, interviewing the of a tabloid that has published the names, photos, and addresses of top 100 and called for them to be hanged. After being redirected to a short advertisement urging me to invest in Korea's free economic zones, I watch a clip of McKenzie interviewing Giles Muhame, introduced as the youthful editor of the tabloid Rolling Stone (confusion with the venerable rock magazine of the same name is in all likelihood intentional). In a striking exchange, Muhame calmly parries McKenzies increasingly exasperated attempts to get him to deny the worst of what he is accused of. Yes, Muhame affirms, he did intend to gain quick publicity for his venture through outing gays. Yes, he does believe that homosexuality is immoral, criminal, and a sickness more dangerous to the body politic than terrorism. And yes, he hopes that his publicity stunt will lead to the arrest and the hanging of gays. Indeed, as Muhame calmly adopts the posture of alterity, and McKenzie performs his astonishment on behalf of those whom he names as his Western viewers, the confrontation devolves into a curious short-circuit. There seems to be no characterization of his position that McKenzie can get Muhame to disagree with except, notably, the claim that the Rolling Stone story has led to extralegal mob violence against indi- viduals. That, Muhame hotly denies, is a flat-out lie. My analysis of the protean subject of discursive incommensurability draws upon postcolonial theory while sidestepping the tempta- tion to resurrect an innocent subject. Instead I look to theorists of neoliberalism as a global political project, and communicative capitalism as its dominant mode of discursive production. This perspective frames my approach to the exchange between Muhame and McKenzie and to similar scenes in contemporary media that are staging anxieties over an African homophobia cast as at once atavistic, protean, and portentously necropolitical (Mbembe 2003). Rolling Stone's campaign against gays cer- tainly seems to fit under the rubric of a death-driven politics (particularly given that, shortly after it occurred, a prominent gay activist was brutally murdered in his home) (Rice 201 1).2 This may tempt us to accept (o)BradNYC's characterization of proposed legislation in Uganda's parliament - the so-called Bahati bill, which would extend severe penal- ties, including death, to offenses ranging from promoting homosexual- ity to the seduction of the innocent - as protogenocidal. Especially within a media context that often frames contemporary sub- Sanaran Africa as a charnel house of horror, we may see the antigay campaign in Uganda as joining the long list of what postcolonial theorist Achille Mbembe terms the new and unique forms of social existence in which vast popu- lations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the sta- tus of the living dead(2003, 40). Indubitably, queer activism, rights, and existence in sub-Saharan Africa, as elsewhere, can be a matter of life or death (see, for instance, Kato 2010). But, insofar as Mbembe's essay is a call to expand and render more complex our accounts of contemporary sovereignty, we might want to use the concept of necropolitics to ques- tion, rather than ratify, the stereotyped horror that the CNN television and webcast affirms. In particular, we require an analysis of necropolitics that accounts for its presence within communicative capitalism, rather than one that extends stereotypes of a violent Africa. …