Ethnicity as Frottage in Jomo Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya

Chapter 3 argues that Jomo Kenyatta attempts to fuse an ethno-nationalist and ethno-diasporic project through a genealogical imperative that explicitly excludes homosexuality. I track how Kenyatta develops his understanding of ethno-nationalism as a gendered and heteronormative structure while editing the Kikuyu-language newspaper Muigwithania in the late 1920s and argue that Facing Mount Kenya extends this ethno-nationalist project while also engaging the ethno-diasporic structures Kenyatta engaged as an activist and student in London in the mid-to-late 1930s. Kenyatta tries to use ethnicity—specifically, Kikuyu identity—to disengage from black diasporic histories of thingification. Thus, his work offers an important window for examining how African studies continues to reject the role of colonial modernity in forging ideas of global blackness. Kenyatta wrote Facing Mount Kenya as Bronislaw Malinowski’s student at the London School of Economics and as part of a vibrant, London-based black diaspora collective that included C.L.R. James, George Padmore, and Amy Garvey. I draw from these disciplinary and political contexts to argue that Facing Mount Kenya frames its ethno-nationalist and ethno-diasporic project within the intimate terms established within black diasporic circles. Despite Kenyatta’s resistance to “thingification” as a frame, Facing Mount Kenya explicitly addresses sexological paradigms advanced by Havelock Ellis and Malinowski and embedded within colonial modernity’s logics. I am especially interested in how Kenyatta discusses frottage among young people (ombani na ngweko) as a model for thinking about ethnicity as constant rubbing, and I argue that ombani na ngweko provides Kenyatta with a model for engaging the ethno-national and the ethno-diasporic.

Mourning the Erotic in René Maran’s Batouala

Chapter 2, “Mourning the Erotic in René Maran’s Batouala,” places erotic practice and imagination at the heart of Afro-diasporic and African relations. Maran was born in Martinique and wrote Batouala (1921) while a French colonial official in Central Africa. The novel centers on a love triangle that involves Batouala, the village chief; Yassigui’ndja, his first wife; and Bissibi’ngui, a young man newly emboldened by the possibilities colonialism offers for social advancement. The climax of the novel features a sexual dance, at the heart of which is Yassigui’ndja penetrating a young woman with a dildo while the community around her watches and celebrates, before being stimulated to engage in an orgy, where “every perversion” is permitted. Throughout the novel, Maran depicts Banda erotic desires and practices as incessant, insatiable, multiple, communal, and same-sex, and critiques colonialism for disrupting these erotic diversities. I argue that while the novel is set in colonial-era Africa, its representations of Banda erotic practices mourn the loss of African gendered and erotic diversity under colonial modernity. Whereas the genealogical imperative in black diaspora studies has mourned the loss of hetero-kinship, Maran’s novel mourns the loss of a broader range of libidinal freedoms. In situating erotic diversity as a site of loss and mourning, Maran provides an affective location for rapprochement between Afro-diasporic and African populations that skirts a genealogical imperative.

Antinomian Intimacy in Claude McKay’s Jamaica

Chapter 4 turns to Jamaican-born Claude McKay’s Jamaica-based poetry in Constab Ballads (1911) and fiction in Banana Bottom (1933). Recent scholarship has positioned McKay as an exemplary black diasporic queer, focusing largely on his U.S.-based Home to Harlem (1928) and the France-based Banjo (1929). In contrast, McKay’s Jamaica-based work has been neglected, suggesting that it is inadequately diasporic, inadequately queer, or both. Jamaica as “home” is rendered normative by its absence from discussions of McKay’s queer aesthetics and politics. I turn to Jamaican slave, emancipation, and post-emancipation histories to frame McKay’s poetry and fiction. In doing so, I demonstrate that McKay derives his models of gender and sexuality from Jamaican histories of labor and punishment. Under slavery, men and women performed the same work and received the same punishments, and thus were similarly (un)gendered, a process that extended the logics and practices of thingification generated by enslavement and commodification. Following emancipation in 1832, the colonial government attempted to distinguish men from women by how it treated work and punishment: thus, as I illustrate, queer Jamaican history is not predicated on same-sex eroticism, but in the range of embodied practices and desires made legible and illegible through slave and emancipation histories. In Constab Ballads and Banana Bottom, McKay depicts not only a range of erotic diversities, but, more importantly, a range of epistemological frames for understanding those diversities that depart from colonial modernity’s pathologizing logics. McKay goes where Fanon does not know how to, by demonstrating the place of erotic freedom within black diasporic struggles.

Frantz Fanon’s Homosexual Territories

This chapter identifies Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) as a fault line between black diaspora studies and queer studies, and argues that it is a central work for theorizing the inextricability of blackness and sexuality in colonial modernity. By the mid-1990s, as queer studies was consolidating into a field, an uneasy consensus had been reached in work by Diana Fuss, Jonathan Dollimore, Lee Edelman, and Kobena Mercer that queer scholars could learn from Fanon’s work on blackness, but he was too homophobic for queer scholars to engage. So successful has this divide been that almost no contemporary scholarly work in black queer studies and black queer diaspora studies engages Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. In turn, almost none of the important scholarship on Fanon takes sexuality as a foundational element of his thinking. My chapter argues that Fanon provides a genealogy of sexuality that has blackness as its foundation. The black person’s body is the psychic object of colonial modernity’s desire and the material through which such desire is expressed. Simply put, within the world created by colonial modernity—I use Sylvia Wynter’s 1492 as a handy starting point—desire and sexuality cannot be imagined without the black person’s body. In the latter part of the chapter, I move beyond this genealogical account and examine how Fanon’s attention to touch—“Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself?”—can be juxtaposed with Audre Lorde’s theory of the erotic to imagine and practice black livability. I read Fanon’s final injunction to “touch” the other as reclaiming frottage for black diasporic collectivity.

Introduction

I first read Alex Haley’s Roots (1976) in the late 1980s, in my parents’ Nairobi home. It left me with a haunting image of slavery that has guided me to this book. Following his capture, Kunta Kinte is locked in a slave hold, chained together with other men: “he very slowly and carefully explored his shackled right wrist and ankle with his left hand. … He pulled lightly on the chain; it seemed to be connected to the left ankle and wrist of the man he had fought with. On Kunta’s left, chained to him by the ankles, lay some other man, someone who kept up a steady moaning, and they were all so close that their shoulders, arms, and legs touched if any of them moved even a little.”...

Beginnings, in Seven Movements

This concluding meditation reflects on how to read and experience the book as an aesthetic experiment.