"Africanizing Queerness": S.N. Nyeck and S.M. Rodriguez in conversation with Nathalie Etoke

A major component of white supremacy is the control and misrepresentation of historically dominated populations. For several years now, western media has fashioned a homophobic identity specific to people of African descent. In 2006, Time Magazine asked whether Jamaica was “The Most Homophobic Place on Earth?” while in 2018, The Guardian published an article titled: “Welcome to Jamaica – No Longer the Most Homophobic Place on Earth.” Meanwhile, the media in the United States constantly characterizes the Black community as homophobic, noting that homosexuality is illegal in thirty-two African countries and is punishable by the death penalty in five, while overlooking the fact that these measures are financially and/or ideologically supported by the United States’ right-wing evangelical apparatus. Furthermore, this focus on state-sponsored homophobia leads to a narrow and restrictive understanding of Queer subjectivities in the African context. Because the West ignores the repressive interventions made by its own evangelicals, a complicated story about agency, resistance, negotiation, and imperialism is absent from its mainstream narrative about Queerness in sub-Saharan Africa. The congruent relationship between homonationalism and nationalist homophobia results in the erasure and silencing of African Queer subjectivities.

Against such a background, this conversation between Dr. S.N. Nyeck and Dr. S.M. Rodriguez centres on African Queer modes of being. While highlighting “the difficulty of engaging in scholarship on queer issues from a non-Western standpoint in the context of Higher Education in North America”, Dr. Nyeck’s body of work is committed to exploring the African Queer Presence as a way of existing in a world of complex social, political, cultural, and historical relations. In her work, Queerness leads to an ethical negotiation of inter-relationality that encompasses but also transcends sexuality. Dr. Rodriguez’s work shows that the work of NGOs and western activists does not result from an anti-capitalist perspective. Rather, it is founded on inequalities that reproduce relations of domination, dependance, and profit. Nyeck’s and Rodriguez’s research provides an insightful analysis that problematizes tensions between local and global power dynamics in the day-to-day existence of Queer people in Sub-Saharan Africa.

S.N. Nyeck is Associate Professor of African Studies, Political Economy, Gender, and Queer Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, USA. One of the founders of queer studies in Africa, she writes about queer issues in Africa using as diverse tools as literature, political theory, theology, and African philosophy. Her latest book is African(a) Queer Presence: Ethics and Politics of Negotiation (2021).
Homepage: https://www.colorado.edu/ethnicstudies/people/core-faculty/sn-nyeck
Latest book: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-61225-6

S.M. Rodriguez is Assistant Professor of Gender, Rights and Human Rights at the London School of Economics and Political Science. As a scholar-activist committed to anti-violence in their community and research, Rodriguez’s work spans concerns of the criminalized, queer, and/or disabled people of African descent and relies on engaged methodologies to answer questions of transformative change. They are the author of The Economies of Queer Inclusion: Transnational Organizing for LGBTI Rights in Uganda (2019).
Website: https://www.smrodriguez.com
Latest book: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498581738/The-Economies-of-Queer-Inclusion-Transnational-Organizing-for-LGBTI-Rights-in-Uganda

Nathalie Etoke is an Associate Professor of Francophone and Africana Studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She specializes in literature and cinema of Francophone sub-Saharan Africa, black French studies, queer studies in Africa and the Caribbean, and Africana existential thought. Her 2019 book Melancholia Africana received the Frantz Fanon Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Her new book, Black Existential Freedom, was published last year by Rowman and Littlefield.
Homepage: https://www.gc.cuny.edu/people/nathalie-etoke
Latest book: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538157060/Black-Existential-Freedom

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