Out of Time

Abstract

Between 2009 and 2014, an anti-homosexuality law circulating in the Ugandan parliament attracted global attention for the draconian nature of its provisions and for the involvement of US anti-gay evangelical Christians who were reported to have lobbied for its passage. This book makes three contributions to our understanding of these developments. First, it offers an account of the international relations that anticipated and followed the Anti Homosexuality Act. Journeying through encounters between the kingdom of Buganda and British colonialism, between the Ugandan state and its international donors, and between LGBTI activists in the global South and North, the book illuminates the frictional collaborations across geopolitical divides that produce and contest contemporary queerphobias. Second, it explores the dialectic produced by two opposed statements that mark queer postcolonial disagreements—‘homosexuality is Western’ and ‘homophobia is Western’. Arguing that both statements are plausible but evasive, the book demonstrates how their opposition produces distinctive forms of temporal politics in the queer postcolony. In this register, the book explores the afterlives of colonialism and the queer futures enabled by it in Uganda, India, and Britain. Third, in shifting the scenes of encounter that it investigates from one chapter to the next, the book reveals how queerness mutates in different configurations of power to become a metonym for other categories such as nationality, religiosity, race, class, and caste. It argues that these mutations reveal the grammars forged in the originary violence of the state and social institutions in which queer difference struggles to find place.

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