Program of African Studies

Intro by Queering Belonging curator Bimbola Akinbola (performance studies, Northwestern University)

While the contentiousness of community has been taken up by several scholars in African and African Diaspora Studies, there remains a tension between the knowledge that family and community is messy and complicated, and the romanticization of the type of belonging that is speculated to have been experienced by Africans prior to colonization and even still today for those “who never left.” The theme of this mini-series, Queering Belonging, speaks to work that disrupts overly simplified and romantic conceptualizations of belonging and community in African contexts. In this series, Bimbola Akinbola, Xavier Livermon, Keguro Macharia, and Tiffany Mugo consider how community, family, and kin are being redefined and reimagined on the African continent and in the diaspora. By reflecting on queer approaches to belonging and other articulations of non-normative relationality in African and diasporic contexts, they consider how taking a deep look at where and how people find belonging leads to a more expansive and liberatory understanding of the nature of community and kin.

The first talk in the series is “And so, Kinship?” by Keguro Macharia.

Keguro Macharia is an independent scholar from Nairobi, Kenya. Macharia’s scholarship explores the relation between difference and freedom across the Black Diaspora, focusing specifically on the seam between Africa and Afro-diaspora. Macharia is the author of Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora (NYU Press, 2019), winner of the 2020 Alan Bray Memorial Prize. Other writing has appeared in Brick, GLQ, Research in African Literatures, The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies, and The Queer African Reader. Macharia blogs at gukira.wordpress.com and is on Twitter as @keguro_.