Queer Africa: literature as art of resistance

Abstract

The discussion about literature as a fictional space of resistance in contexts of oppression in life is rich. Relatedly, wefind literary works by African authors that represent queer bodies in fictional spaces in which, in life, are marked byhomophobia and/or the criminalization of homosexuality. This article therefore aims to thematically present QueerAfrica: New and Collected Fiction and Queer Africa 2: New Stories. To this end, we discussed the context ofcriminalization of homosexuality in the authors’ birth countries and brought to the debate African and Africanistscholars who discuss how the theologization and politicization of the religious discourse, according to which queerpeople are sinful and deprived of the grace of God, and the discourse of the tradition, according to whichhomosexuality is a product of the West and, therefore, un-African, seek the permanence of the status quo in these countries. During the thematic analysis of the short stories and the analysis of “Pub 360” based on Bakhtin’s theoryof the novel, we realized that the short story writers brought to the fictional world the representation of the conflictsexperienced by characters who discover or live their sexuality in the midst of homophobic or criminalizing contextsand the love and passion of couples who live and explore their sexuality in their daily lives; that is, it is the humanand humanizing experiences of queer bodies represented in the short stories that make these collections an art ofresistance not only for the representation they make, but for their very existence.