African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization

Abstract

African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization. By Neville Hoad. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Pp. xxxiii, 187. $20.00 paper. African Intimacies is a genealogy of the ideas of race, sex, and nation. Neville Hoad argues that the present era is marked by the emergence of an international public sphere dedicated to finding and making homosexuals in parts of the world that have not seen public articulations of such people. At the same time, he argues, these public articulations in these places have also allowed homosexuality to be seen as an ongoing imperial project. Through six case studies Hoad analyses a series of historical and literary representations of predominantly, but not only, male same sex corporeal intimacies in Africa. These presentations are contextualized in the light of current and recent public debates about the un-African nature of homosexuality, and the necessity and difficulty of discussions of African sexuality more generally in relation to the sub-Saharan HIV/AIDS pandemic (p. xxvii). The book is organized chronologically from the 1880s to the present. Hoad is quick to point out that this organization serves only to highlight points of crisis during a much longer period wherein longstanding discursive forces have organized representations of race, sex, sovereignty, and imperialism. Chapter 1 revisits and reinterprets the story of the Ganda male martyrs of 1886 who were executed by the last indigenous ruler of Buganda for refusing to have sex with him after their conversion to Christianity. Chapter 2 analyzes WoIe Soyinka's first novel, The Interpreters, as an example of writing undertaken during the period of decolonization that is also a narrative that explores subjective desire under the onslaught of racism and economic exploitation. Chapter 3 historicizes the resistance expressed by most African Anglican bishops to the universalization of the homosexual articulated in human rights discourse and used by advocates within the Anglican Church at the 1998 Lambeth Conference. Chapter 4 traces the production of lesbian and gay human rights in and of Southern Africa, recognizing that these rights, based on sexual orientation, are also the most recent formation of the European enlightenment. Chapter 5 wades into the controversy surrounding South African President Thabo Mbeki's pronouncement on the HIV/ AIDS crisis in that country, while Chapter 6 examines the idea of an African Cosmopolitanism in Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow (Durban, 2001 ). Hoad argues that the novel questions the possibility of a stable African identity by tracing the lives of its characters through interconnected rural, urban, national, and international spaces. African Intimacies is important because it insists on breaking the comfortable silences that have fallen, once again, around HIV/AIDS as a global condition. Very few contemporary scholars insist, as Hoad does, that we connect not only questions of sexuality at a global scale but also the interconnected ways in which HIV/AIDS has and continues to kill people in seemingly disconnected spaces. African Intimacies reminded me of thrilling texts like Cindy Patton's Inventing AIDS (London, 1991) and Cathy Cohen's The Boundaries of Blackness (Chicago, 1999). …