Gukira

• Notes on Africa: Facebook, Egypt, Tunisia, and “the rest of us”

  Posted: January 30, 2011, 10:46 pm by keguro

  IF you pay (too much) attention to African voices on facebook, you become aware of the nagging fear of disorder: anarchy is being unleashed in Egypt, some say; a “revolution” is all well and good, others say, but it needs a “plan.” “Change” is a fine sentiment, but where is the “strategy for going forward?” [...]

• Queer Africa: Mourning David Kato

  Posted: January 27, 2011, 9:43 am by keguro

  News arrives from a dear friend that David Kato, a Ugandan activist outed by Uganda’s homophobic Rolling Stone has been beaten to death. I did not know David, but our networks intersect. Most recently, David was one of three Ugandans who successfully sued Rolling Stone and forced it to shut down its hateful operations. * [...]

• Queer Africa: The Problem of Evidence

  Posted: January 26, 2011, 6:25 am by keguro

  Consider the following: Taken from an archive file dated 9th May 1912, it cultivates multiple desires. For some of us, a desire that these two found comfort with each other, no matter its form; for others, a desire that these two were “gay,” forerunners of some kind; for others, a desire to relocate them from [...]

• Making Academic Labor Public

  Posted: January 25, 2011, 9:16 pm by keguro

  In primary school, I was always puzzled by students who claimed their parents (usually fathers) were in “business.” “Business” had a self-explanatory power that remained mysterious. In contrast, I knew my father was an OB/GYN: I visited him at work, I flipped through his medical books, and while I could not have explained what he [...]

• Queer Africa: Pre-Writing, Writing, Re-Writing

  Posted: January 24, 2011, 5:38 pm by keguro

  Introduction I have been reluctant to write something on “queer Africa,” even though that phrase recurs on this blog and in my scholarly work. The “essay” that tries to “map the field,” so to speak, was planted a while ago, germinated, and then stagnated, “waiting for the rains”: an occasion, a provocation, an intention, a [...]

• Are Students Learning?

  Posted: January 18, 2011, 3:46 pm by keguro

  It’s a good question. Should professors demand more? And will doing so make students learn more? One take from The Chronicle of Higher Ed: The study makes clear that there are two kinds of college students in America. A minority of them start with a good high-school education and attend colleges that challenge them with [...]

• English: A Long View

  Posted: January 16, 2011, 2:52 am by keguro

  A comment from The Chronicle of Higher Education on the “state” of English: Post-colonial studies, transnationalism, postmodernism and poststructuralism have taken hold as the dominant foci of English faculty. It is not enough that these scholars refuse to read the literature of historians, anthropologists sociologists and the like, they also refuse to teach basic literature [...]

• Environments and Acts

  Posted: January 13, 2011, 12:55 am by keguro

  Two overly simplistic narratives have emerged about “the shooting” in Arizona. In the first, careless rhetoric created the conditions necessary for the shooter to take action. Less abstractly: people act on what they hear and see, giving life to metaphors. In the second, the shooter was mentally ill, acting out his symptoms. The first narrative [...]

• Kenya Yetu. Katiba Yetu. Maisha Yetu

  Posted: January 12, 2011, 3:00 am by keguro

  A call to action.

• Slave vs. Nigger

  Posted: January 11, 2011, 7:33 pm by keguro

  How have we come to believe that the word “slave” is less offensive, less objectionable, less hurtful than the word “nigger”? What forms of amnesia and unknowing must we enact to accept this claim? While I understand the claims for “historical distance” that give “nigger” a “bite” ostensibly absent from the word “slave,” I also [...]

• Syllabus Ideas: Queer Africa

  Posted: January 8, 2011, 6:15 am by keguro

  I am offering an introductory class in the spring semester. Still feeling my way through it, but here’s what an advanced version might look like—had I all the time. I am interested in working through sexology-anthropology as a way to get to embodiment. (I leave out “the” “Venus Hottentot” because I agree with Zine Magubane—Baartman’s [...]

• Syllabus Ideas: Folk Modernities

  Posted: January 7, 2011, 8:38 pm by keguro

  This class dates back to my Special Fields exams—the transition to ABD. I was wondering about the markers attached to “afro-modernity,” questioning Gilroy’s formulations, and also thinking about “afro-modernity” through “diaspora,” as a site of cross-identification—essentially adapting Stuart Hall. The question was how “the rural” and “the folk” acted as “modern” points of “identification” across [...]

• Syllabus Ideas: The Black Diaspora

  Posted: January 7, 2011, 5:26 pm by keguro

  Following Aaron’s example, I thought I’d post some recent ideas for future classes. Here’s a grad version of the black diaspora. I tilt in very particular ways, and so it might be really predictable. It ends on two lit-crit works because I’d like students to imagine how the “wide” of the black diaspora can be [...]

• Not Yet

  Posted: January 7, 2011, 3:42 pm by keguro

  A series of quotation that have yet to be processed. That, perhaps, I dare not process. The most recent issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly focuses on the “state” of theory. Ellis Hanson represents one take on “queer” theory. Here he is, “working through” Eve Sedgwick’s concept of “reparative reading”: Faced with the depressing realization [...]

• A Fragment to Open the Year

  Posted: January 2, 2011, 6:11 am by keguro

  places do not change so much as what we seek in them and faith will serve along the way to somewhere else where work begins. –Audre Lorde, “To Martha: A New Year”

Blah blah blah

Fish cakes

Alas a fish cake.

Yet more fish cakes

Guess what ... yeah ... fish cakes.

The end of the fish cakes