Being an African: Some Queer Remarks from the Margins

Paul Prinsloo

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Being an African: Some Queer Remarks from the Margins

In: From Conflict to Recognition

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Paul Prinsloo

Paul Prinsloo
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 139–158

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401208109_009

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The University of South Africa (Unisa) has embarked on an official Africanisation process impacting on staff composition and curricula. This chapter critically engages the construct of an assumed African identity from a specific personal location shaped by seemingly incommensurable characteristics of race, gender, culture, religion and location. This chapter firstly proposes Africanisation as a necessary counter-narrative to the historical and continuing hegemony of North Atlantic epistemological and ontological canons, with the aim of decentring Western descriptions of African identity. Africanisation can secondly be understood as a discourse of perpetual longing for a quintessential African identity and culture as an archaeological project searching for and falling back on archives of identity and belonging. A third option for defining Africanness involves a palimpsest approach where the project is not to deconstruct and de-layer the different gestalts of identity in order to discover the ‘original’ but define identity as dynamically constructed and fluid at a specific time and place where identities are marked by a multiplicity of subject positions. This chapter proposes identity, and specifically the African identity, as neither fixed nor singular, but rather as a constantly changing relational multiplicity. Despite this constant changing relational multiplicity, identities do assume specific patterns, as in a kaleidoscope, against particular sets of personal, social and historical circumstances.

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From Conflict to Recognition

Moving Multiculturalism Forward

Series: At the Interface / Probing the Boundaries, Volume: 79

E-Book ISBN:: 9789401208109

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 01 Jan 2012

Subjects
- Social Sciences
  - Cultural Studies

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Being an African: Some Queer Remarks from the Margins

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From Conflict to Recognition

Moving Multiculturalism Forward

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