Heteroerotic Failure and “Afro-queer Futurity” in Mohamed Camara’s Dakan

African Studies Keywords: Queer

“…Although this field has been characterized by a strong focus on South Africa as an apparent key site of “the dream of love to come” (Munro 2012; see also Spurlin 2006; Tucker 2009; Livermon 2012; Morison, Lynch & Reddy 2019; Sizemore-Barber 2020; Riley 2021), recent years have witnessed an increasing body of scholarship on queer subjectivities and politics in other parts of the continent, such as Democratic Republic of Congo (Hendriks 2018, 2022), Ghana (Dankwa 2021; Otu 2022), Kenya (Ombagi 2019a; van Klinken 2019), Nigeria (Gaudio 2009; Munro 2016; Onanuga 2021), Mozambique (De Araújo 2021a, 2021b), and Uganda (Rodriguez 2019; Rao 2020). Methodologically and thematically, the focus is wide-ranging, from social movements and community organizing (Broqua 2012; Guéboguo 2008; Mbaye 2018; Nyeck & Epprecht 2013; Lorway 2015; Vrede 2020) to creative forms of visibility and activism, such as through arts (Meiu 2022), literature (Adenekan 2021; Azuah 2009, 2019; Mwangi 2017; Ofei & Oppong-Adjei 2021; Zabus 2013), film (Johnstone 2021; Ncube 2020, 2021; Ndjio 2021; Otu 2021; Scott 2021; Green-Simms 2022), social media (Gunkel 2013; Mwangi 2014; Onanuga 2021), sports (Ndjio 2022), autobiographical storytelling (Baderoon 2015; Oloruntoba-Oju 2021; Ombagi 2019b; Stobie 2014; van Klinken & Stiebert 2021), and material objects (Meiu 2020). Other studies foreground how, in fact, invisibility, silence, and secrecy can afford strategic possibilities of negotiating queer expressions in ways that counter expectations of queerness as defined by overt resistance and protest (Nyanzi 2015; Oudenhuijsen 2021).…”

“…In Western media, on the other hand, Ghana's bill is represented as "a homophobe's dream," and as "the worst anti-LGBTQ bill ever" (Gregory 2021). This exemplifies a narrative in which the West uses LGBTþ rights in order to reaffirm its own self-image as progressive and modern by contrasting itself to its Other, the African continent, which supposedly is "the worst place to be gay" (Mills 2011; also see Otu 2017). Arguably, this representation directly or indirectly reinforces longstanding ideas of Africa's "backwardness" and perpetuates imaginaries of Africa in which the West, in Mbembe's words, "represents the origin of its own norms, develops a self-image, and integrates this image into the set of signifiers asserting what it supposes to be its identity" (2001:2).…”