Stadt: Cologne, Germany

Frist: 2023-01-09

Beginn: 2023-05-31

Ende: 2023-06-03

URL: https://ecasconference.org/2023/cfp

The futurity of the queer body – Case studies from lusophone African countries
Panel at the European Conference on African Studies (ECAS), Cologne, 31 May 2023 – 3 June 2023

In 2004, Lee Edelman attested the queer community a death drive. His call to neglect the future as a parameter when doing queer theory was enthusiastically taken up and widely received. In Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics (2003), too, the future seems to have no place; instead, (state-regulated) dying becomes the defining factor. Thus, it did not take long for these two concepts to be merged (Queer Necropolitics 2014). Our section, on the contrary, wishes to think the futurity of queer bodies and wants to examine contemporary queer communities’ and individuals’ contributions to alternative forms of future togetherness (cf. Meiu 2022).

The Portuguese-speaking countries in Africa seem to be of particular interest, because on the one hand, gender diversity is nothing entirely new or unknown in the cultures concerned (for example, the Chibados in Angola have always been known as the third gender), but, on the other, queer productions and theoretical analysis from these countries are still extremely rare in comparison to the Anglophone and Francophone parts of the continent. Some of the few famous examples might be the Cape Verdean writer Fernando Monteiro or singer Titica from Angola. We therefore call for contributions that deal with queer cultural productions from the Portuguese-speaking countries of Africa – this includes literature as well as film, music and photography – and work out whether alternative futures are imagined in the respective works and, if so, what they look like. Presentations on queer theorizing in said countries are also welcome.

Topics may deal with (but are not limited to):
• Queer characters in literary texts (e.g. by Fernando Monteiro or Evel Rocha).
• Queer anthologies, such as “Hopes and Dreams that sound like yours” (Pellot 2021)
• Photographic projects such as “Hotel Luso” by Daniel Jack Lyon or “Quel Pedra” by Pauliana Valente Pimentel
• Music by the Angolan singer and trans* woman Titica
• Films like the documentaries “Tchindas” or “Sakudi” (Cabo Verde)

Please go to the ECAS Website to hand in your proposal (our panel is Lang06). For further questions, please contact Janek Scholz (janek.scholz@uni-koeln.de) or Alexander Altevoigt (alexander.altevoigt@uni-goettingen.de).

Beitrag von: Janek Scholz

Redaktion: Robert Hesselbach