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Abstract:
Rather than attempting to recover African same-sex practices from the past, we probe the kinds of discursive protocols that can be implemented to uncover queer African archives, defined as methods and movements. In this process, we reconceptualize a transnational queer archive that remains vigilant against dominant taxonomies and actively connected to its political present and future. Because queer African subjects are (dis)located at the junction of multiple sociocultural traditions and geographies, we approach the queer African archive as both an elusive and dynamic site of knowledge production that calls for cross-disciplinary methodologies.
introduction
The archive as both repository and methodological concept has spawned increasing interdisciplinary exchanges, fueled by the development of digital forms of knowledge production. The "queer archive" has spurred further debates inspired by Michel Foucault's definition of the archive as a "system of discursivity" (1982, 129) and Jacques Derrida's postmodern musings on "archive fever" (1996) as central to the politics of individual and collective memory, desire, and interpretation.1 In mining various literary, performative, and visual materials and sexual subcultures, Ann Cvetkovich (2003) and Jack Halberstam (2005) in particular have stressed the importance of recovering a queer "archive of feelings" that accounts not only for the past trauma of queer lives but also for the repression, ephemerality, and often spectral traces of queer experiences.
Although some scholars have written on the history and traditions of African same-sex practices, systematic and meticulous archival work on that topic has remained limited. In his research on male homosexuality in South African compounds and prisons at the turn of the twentieth century, Zackie Achmat, in his genealogical attempt "to recover from the archives a series of local knowledges for queers in contemporary South Africa," paved the way for other scholars to engage in similar research (1993, 108). Marc Epprecht notably has worked on uncovering "a pan-regional, proto-queer identity firmly rooted in history" in southern Africa while acknowledging the many obstacles encountered in the process, from the silence or destruction of historical sources and documents, to the prejudices laced with such accounts (2004, 4). Other historians have tackled the multidimensional complexity of archival work on the African continent, specifically South Africa, using a feminist and social lens that highlights the controversial status of queer African archives (Hamilton...