1st Edition
Post-Apartheid Same-Sex Sexualities Restless Identities in Literary and Visual Culture
This book examines how same-sex sexualities are represented in several post-apartheid South African cultural texts, drawing on a rich local archive of same-sex sexualities that includes recent fiction, drama, film, photography, and popular print culture. While the book situates these texts within the specific context of post-apartheid South Africa, it also looks outwards towards transnational connectivity and cultural flows.
The author uses the idea of restlessness to refer to the uneven flow of cultural tropes, political sentiment, ideas, ideologies, and representational modes across geographical boundaries, across time and space, and between genres, presenting sexual cultures as simultaneously rooted and transnational. He focuses on how notions of race and gender, in the shadow of colonialism and apartheid, play out in the present and shape how sexualities are represented.
This interdisciplinary book offers a conceptual entry point to several areas of study, including transnationalism, literary and cultural studies, critical race theory, gender and sexuality studies, and African studies, and will be of interest to students and researchers across these fields. Its inclusion of a range of textual genres extends its reach into visual culture, film and media studies, history, and politics.
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1: Sexual Rights and the Anti-Apartheid Movement
Chapter 2: Same-Sex Sexualities and the Idea of Africa
Chapter 3: White Gay Imaginaries and Politics of Exclusion
Chapter 4: Repositioning the Black Female Body
Chapter 5: The Routes of the Indian Diaspora in South Africa
Conclusion
Biography
Andy Carolin is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa.
"The book is conceptually sophisticated and offers an exceptionally engaging and enlightening examination of how the meaning-making of texts is neither fixed nor stable but rather restless – open to multiple meanings by exposing them to different contexts and horizons."
Dr Rory du Plessis, University of Pretoria, South Africa
"Carolin’s book is an archival work in as much as it is a work of textual analysis and literary criticism; the book details multiple stories of sexual rights in South Africa and archives diverse lived experiences of same-sex intimacies through visual and literary texts."
Dr Grant Andrews, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
"Post-Apartheid Same-Sex Sexualities is an invaluable addition to the growing archive and body of scholarship on same-sex and queer sexualities in South Africa. It is a book which will be important to scholars and students of non-conforming African sexualities and gender identities who have a particular interest in film and literary studies."
Dr Gibson Ncube, Stellenbosch University, South Africa, writing in the Journal of the African Literature Association
“[Post-Apartheid Same-Sex Sexualities] is a ‘queer’ text in the best possible way. And by this, I mean ‘queer’ in the way that it was originally conceived of, full of promise, potential and radicalness—a ‘queer’ that was always aware that its usefulness might end, or be replaced, because ‘queer’ was theorised as an open signifier without fixed meaning and with no attachable political agenda. Without so much as using the word ‘queer,’ Carolin has constructed a text that indexes the most radical of thinkers in the area of race, gender and sexuality, thinkers who have refused to be co-opted by the academy or the disciplining field of Queer Theory”
Prof Tracey McCormick, University of Johannesburg, South Africa, writing in the Journal of Literary Studies
“The monograph convincingly asserts that literary and visual cultures contain repositories of historical same-sex desire that have the potential to upend accepted monolithic narratives. These narratives often erase same-sex sexualities and queer political activism from the official archive of the post-apartheid nation-state”
Jarred Thompson, University of Pretoria, South Africa, writing in the journal English in Africa
