Chantal Zabus and Chris Dunton’s edited anthology Transafrica: The Languages of Postqueerness renders a reading of postqueer personhood on the African continent that is as nuanced as it is diverse. Transafrica covers material from southern Africa, West Africa, and Islamic Africa—including East Africa—through what emerges as a multifaceted spectrum of case studies. Chapters include reviews of fiction, autofiction, historical analysis, and contemporary testimonies rooted in lived experience. The postqueer expressions contained therein involve mediums from literature and poetry to public engagements and architectural design, all of which speak to a sense of diffused coherence in positioning postqueerness within African cosmologies. Much of the content requires a background knowledge of the topic literature and can be dense at times, but that perspective is hardly a critique given that the volume would be unlikely to coalesce in such a well-developed way through different means.
The choice of “postqueer” rather than “queer” reflects the anthology’s emphasis on locating identity in relation to the nexus of Eurocentric intellectual frameworks for queerness and connected, yet non-analogous developments on the African continent. This formulation embodies the drive to supersede each trajectories’ discourses through orienting non-heteronormative genders and sexualities as both culturally and historically inherent, as well as being socio-politically emergent in the contemporary era. As many of the collection’s contributors allude to, “queer” often represents liberational, secular frameworks in the West, while the term has been incorporated into an internally repressive rhetoric of anticolonial rejection in African nations.
“Postqueer” becomes a more appropriate mechanism to describe the subjectivities of personhood and identity in a way that draws on indigeneity as a means to carve out a place for those belonging to the postqueer to resist condemnation by dominant norms in various African societies. As the editors enunciate, “postqueer” serves four functions in the volume: (1) It integrates African linguistic traditions such as in Logan February’s account of pronoun fluidity; (2) It maps postsecularism in the postqueer escape through uniquely African forms of imported religion (Pentecostal Christianity) as well as some of the multigendered spiritual legacies of the precolonial era; (3) It facilitates the articulation of self through narration in chapters such as Chantal Zabus’s account of “translects,” where the incongruencies of gender and sexuality between members of a group make any real reconciliation of tidy academic terminology somewhat impossible; (4) Finally, as in Francois Lion-Cachet’s chapter on the deployment of the tree and nature as a mutually protective symbol in postapartheid South Africa, postqueering also invokes an ecoqueering of returns to indigenous paradigms.
One of the most prominent themes that emerges in Transafrica relates to the diverse ways in which each chapter reflects on what it means to pursue postqueer visibilization on the continent. One distinct facet of the postqueer seems to be that visibilization can be a process that may actively manifest, or it may almost obscure postqueer identities by making them passively commonplace in social formations. Chapters such as Philippe-Joseph Salazar’s contribution on the confluence of academic and advocacy efforts through South African conferences navigate the very public articulation of postqueer dynamics in response to power structures and laws stigmatizing impacted groups. Conversely, Alyette Rajaofera Andriamasinalivao’s chapter on the more recent adaptations of sarimbavy sex workers in Malagasy communities illustrates gender-nonconformity as a process which takes a more subtle approach to visibility. Here, local customs validate nonconformity not as overt identity signification, but rather they facilitate a passive normalization of these postqueer characteristics as ones already embedded within the social fabric. Similarly, Logan February’s chapter on pronouns reveals an interesting bifurcation of visibility. As they articulate, Yorùbá language structures are often genderless, allowing February’s nonconformity to be seen via normalization despite the fact that they are simultaneously silenced by the gerontocratic elements of their culture that demand communicative deference.
The collection’s consistent attention to language and translation also merits mention. Indeed, multiple contributors aptly denote just how much of a role the inability to translate concepts into the Western lexicon plays in “postqueer” as a framework full and appreciative of “category crisis.” Across the volume, “gay,” “lesbian,” “nonconforming,” “transgender,” and so on, all take on unique tones among different cultures and subcultures. Trying to put them in conversation with one another would result in a rather disjointed cacophony, but the reality of that conclusion speaks to the success that all of the manifestations falling under the postqueer umbrella have earned in making their variants of postqueer culturally embedded. As Katlego K. Kolanyane-Kesupile notes in his conversation with John McAllister, many people who the volume describes as postqueer have not even come into contact with the term. Awareness appears limited to academic circles and a few niche communities in the artistic sector, with wide variability in what the term actually means.
Ultimately, such disconnects speak to the worth of Transafrica as a reflection of where the term “postqueer” stands across the continent. It is a socioculturally rooted replacement for the Eurocentric “queer” and all of the neocolonial connotations it carries. The diversity of modalities and mediums by which this collection recounts what it means to be postqueer in Africa offers a dynamic account of the term’s cosmological relevance and exemplifies the adaptability with which it—and what it represents—is deployed. Given the term’s relative flux, an anthology filled with different interpretations and analyses is arguably the only means by which an academic reading can currently do “postqueer” justice.
