African(a) Queer Presence : Ethics and Politics of Negotiation

To achieve something by way of negation is not just to state a difference. It is to impose a certain kind of violence and domination on things so ordered around for the sake of epistemic, religious, or political expediency also. The notion of queerness presented in this book takes the view that the process of conceptualizing selves “out-of-order” is fundamentally anti-dialectical, negotiated, political and spiritual. Queerness negation manifested as a form of colonial and postcolonial epistemic and political violence defines reality as the clash of ideal and non-ideal categories. The demand to achieve something by way of negation that dialectics imposes on itself is costly because it treats negation as inevitable. From an anti-dialectical standpoint, analyses of the films Proteus and Karmen Geï deal with the processes of freeing queer selves from colonial and postcolonial negation. The book reflects on the conditions and possibilities of queerness affirmation as an ethics of presence grounded in the politics of negotiation following the proposition of nego-feminism and the practical humanism of Senghor to offer an ethical and embodied vision of an ecological depth of feeling and will as foundational to relational possibilities within the African(a) world. Praise for African(a) Queer Presence Contents 1 Introduction The Materials 2 Dialectics, Simulacra, and Identity Negotiation Framework Definition of Terms and Mapping of the Argument Queerness and Queer Plane One Plane Two Senghor: Streaming a New Humanism Three Levels of Presence Death-Dealing Participative Presence Creative and Revelatory Actual Presence All Virtual Presences Plane 3 Theoretic Muses Adorno: A Player Without a Play? Baudrillard and the Strategy of Appearances Chwe: Folk Game Theory and Strategy as Depth of Desire? 3 Proteus: (Am)bushmen and the Theology of Queer Presence God’s Typewriter: The Simulacrum of Damnation “The Company Says No”: Privatization as Corporate Objection “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”: Building on the Indigenous from Near and Far The Trial of the Subject: Backward-Forward Perspectives and Roads Less Traveled A Drink to !Nanseb as We Jump Ship 4 Queer Rattling: The Postcolony and Blasphemous Displacements Karmen Geï: The Operatic Thing and Its Advent Angélique: Queer Conscription and the Deconstruction of the Thing Involution/Evolution as Queer Discernment Homiletics as Queer Diaphany The Erotic as Kenosis: Beyond the Way of the Fish and Flies 5 Conclusion: Muntu Through a Glass Queerly/Darkly Bibliography Index