X Tourism

For many of us, slum tourism represents a step back in our relation to mostly European and North American white tourists. We worry that the black bodies on display in our slums are akin to the wild animals that adorn the tourist souvenirs we sell. We worry, even more, that those who visit slums will perform an inevitable act of metonymy, and take those slum dwellers as representatives of the true Africa, an Africa whose truth is confirmed on CNN and BBC, the Travel Channel and Discover. We worry, in fact, that we will be tarred with the same brush as those who live in slums. And the precariousness of our middle-class positions, precarious because of our histories and ethnicities if not our finances, will not tolerate such threats.

But this is old. It has been said before. And I am interested, now, in what our critiques of slum tourism enable and mask.

Slum tourism is only one of many hyphenated (silently) tourisms. These include eco-tourism, sex tourism, wild life tourism, marine tourism, and various kinds of archeological tourisms. Each of these comes with its own complex ideological baggage. For instance, wild life tourism is represented by big game hunters and conservationists—those who kill Africa’s animals and those who save them, not least from Africans. And as scholarship on tourism has noted, it is an industry whose rapacious underbelly helps to sustain its façade of respectability. Indeed, a brief look at the ostensibly authentic bare-breasted girls that fill our tourist curios shops tells an ideological truth about what we are selling. Quiet as it’s kept.

Because tourism, in all its hyphenated guises, is such a huge income generator, it has been easier, or at least more expedient, to critique various forms of hyphenated tourisms than to critique tourism as a whole. And, given our truncated approaches toward tourism, some advanced as official national discourses, it has been convenient to distinguish colonial-era tourism, including that immortalized by Hollywood and practiced by figures like Teddy Roosevelt, from post-independent-era tourism.

Certainly, cheaper, budget-friendly tourist packages have somewhat changed the complexion of tourism, and we have as many carpenters and barbers, if not factory workers, visiting as we do bankers, doctors, and lawyers. And these multi-class tourisms have major implications for how we understand post-independence tourisms.

But just as our literary artists and philosophers have cautioned that we should not understand post-independence politics as radically different from colonial-era politics, so, too, we should not understand post-independence-era tourism as being radically different from colonial-era tourism. Radical—this is the right word, pointing to roots.

To suggest that there are overlaps between these two tourist temporalities is not to suggest that they are identical. It is to suggest, in a very imprecise way, how certain economic and cultural interdependencies (not pure dependencies) shape the interaction between Kenya and its tourists. It is also to suggest how these interdependencies create discursive possibilities and impossibilities: we may critique sex tourism or slum tourism, for instance, but we critique them as degraded forms of tourism, not as representing tourism in its entirety.

This is useful fiction from which we all benefit.
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This ramble started with a question about how to understand contemporary race relations between Kenya and its visitors, and predominantly those visitors from former imperial powers. The usual canon of thinkers on colonialism and its legacies seemed inadequate, even dated, part of what I like to call independence-era intellectuals.

Was there, I wondered, a way of thinking about race relations anchored in tourism that was historically distinct from that emerging from colonialism? While we should continue to trace colonialism’s legacies, it seems shortsighted not to engage with other forms of socio-cultural making that cannot be attributed to colonialism.

For those of us born from the late 1960s onward, our dominant engagement with race has been through tourism, not colonialism.

However, because of the elaborate structures of interdependencies tourism needs and creates, we have been relatively muted, unable to stage the same critiques (structurally and affectively) of tourism that prior generations had with colonialism.

There is a lot at stake in how we engage with tourism, of course. To complain about tourism, is to mark oneself as provincial, even xenophobic, and perhaps worse, anti-development. (To be anti-development in Kenya is akin to treason.) We who pride ourselves on our internationalism and hospitality frame tourism as cosmopolitanism, as a kind of necessary, even ethical exchange.

In rushing to avoid provincialism and to practice cosmopolitanism, though, we posit oppositions that have, as one consequence, a studied muteness.

By no means am I suggesting that some of us have not thought about tourism or how it structures race differently than colonialism. I am suggesting that part of the structure of tourism, as an exchange between Kenya and its visitors, is a certain critical silence, an unwillingness to name and critique this contemporary form of race- and world-making.
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I have been trying to figure out, albeit circuitously, why critiques of slum tourism and sex tourism feel so inadequate, so, to use an old word, genteel. I remain fascinated by how hyphenating tourism creates different discursive possibilities and moral and ethical frameworks.

On a more banal note, I am trying to understand the tourist instinct that seems so ingrained in Kenyans: when abroad, we are constantly inviting others to visit, inviting others to be tourists. Our invitations are affectively and ideologically different from those of our hosts who invite us for Thanksgiving or Passover.

Why do we turn into tourist ambassadors?

To answer this why might be one necessary step in understanding tourism’s ideological impact on us and our visitors.

On Caster Semenya

It is difficult to write on Caster Semenya. It is difficult because it participates in an ongoing spectacularization that, at this time, could probably not have been handled better. I write this not simply to be perverse, to go against the many people who have claimed it could have been handled better, but because I think it exposes real fissures among the communities to which, for better or worse, I belong to and study—what that particular combination produces continues to be a source of personal anxiety and intellectual excitement.

Arguably, those who can best speak to Semenya’s situation are queer scholars. Yet, this group might also be the least suitable, and this due to issues of race, nationality, and history. What does it mean when predominantly non-Africa based scholars who work on gender and sexuality speak to an African cause? We already have some answers from the many battles over reproductive health—and this includes those who still believe that such efforts are genocidal, those who believe to plan a family is to kill a people. And we know, as well, the tense relationship that continues to obtain between so-called Western Feminists and so-called African Feminists, or Gender Activists. Culture and Values collide. I bracket this for now.

To speak of Semenya from the position of a queer activist is, of course, to queer Semenya within a very particular context—which is not to say that Semenya has not already been queered in many ways, by those who insist on and contest gender normalcy. Semenya is as queered by those who insist on her gender normativity—she is a woman, her grandmother insists—as by those who insist on hir gender non-normativity—she is not a woman, others contend.

Insisting on Semenya’s woman-ness pits tradition-culture and an alternative-scientific viewpoint (science here simply as knowledge) against medical science gender certifying technologies—that these are certifying rather than authenticating or verifying must be kept in mind. And here the gender activist Africanist inhabits an overly loud history that protests gender certification. This is not a comfortable position.

Insisting on Semenya’s gender non-normativity engages the truth-claims of medical certifying technologies as they engage with scholars and activists who have continued to wrestle with the histories of such truth claims, and the sotto voce medical procedures that have tried to privilege culture over science in the name of science—a science that refuses to admit intersexuality as anything more than a correctible pathology.
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The first time I cracked open a book called Bantu Gynecology it fell to a picture of a “hermaphrodite.” Were I to construct a fiction from that moment, it would say that I became aware that bantu-ness had something to do with sexual morphology, that there was something both dramatic about that morphology and that something traumatic happened to those who, like me, dared to look at it. 8 or 9 is a little late for the primal scene, but this must surely count as one of mine.

No doubt, the headless picture (Man in Polyester Suit has nothing on this) was intended to illustrate a condition, but its very headlessness had a metonymic effect, one heightened by dressing codes. The picture made me uncomfortable, made me wonder if it told a truth about sex, a truth about me, about my own gender non-normativity. It made me wonder about the truth of bantu sex, a truth that was medically certified.

Because my scholarly work has focused predominantly on North America, at least when it comes to questions of morphology, I have been able to avoid the bantu-ness of sex, until now.

As self indulgent as such an awkward confession is, it might help to frame my ongoing attempts to engage Semenya.
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Under what conditions would the Intersex Society of North America or the United Kingdom Intersex Society be able to make a difference in Semenya’s life? These are big questions, though not necessarily the right ones.

Under what conditions would South African queer activists be able to make a difference in Semenya’s life?

Under what conditions would black South African queer activists be able to make a difference in Semenya’s life?

The questions can be multiplied, but the form remains the same.

It is striking that the month-long coverage of this case has not engaged with scholars and activists who work on intersexuality. At least there has been nothing that I have seen. It is striking and saddening because it hides from view the affective communities that Semenya might need most, or not at all.
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It is this push-pull that makes Semenya impossible to talk about.

Internationalized without being cosmopolitan. Gender troubled without being properly gendered. And, now, if we are to believe reports, negotiating a life made impossible.

This is the question that troubles me: what would it take to make Semenya’s life livable? How does one chart a map back from impossibility?
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What does it mean to defend Semenya? How does one defend gender? How does one protect it? How will Semenya’s story circulate and with what effects, especially for those with non-normative modes of expressing gender in Africa?
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I mention one more fissure: between feminist and queer readers of Semenya.

I am not sure what it means to defend Semenya: from what or from whom and to what end? While Semenya might be our millennial anti-Hottentot Venus, as I have described to friends, it is not yet clear to me how Semenya benefits in that iconic position. It is more clear how feminists and queer activists can frame necessary conversations around morphology, expression, nation, and so on.

To use Semenya to illustrate the policing of women’s bodies and lives is necessary. But I wonder to what extent “woman” might become reified in a way that might be antithetical to some queer activism.

To use Semenya to illustrate how bodies and gender are policed and queered is necessary. But I wonder to what extent queer acts of affiliation make Semenya’s life less, rather than more, livable.

To use Semenya as a jumping off point to discuss intersex issues is necessary, not least to avoid reifying women and privileging gender undecidability. Here, we are asked to think seriously about the intersection of biology and culture, about livability in all its messy complication.

And it is this, finally, that concerns me: what is livability for Semenya? What is a rich life, a possible life, a good life?

Color

The real color of the African is really purple and nothing else.

Pauline Hopkins, 1905

Purity

Unless we conquer our present vices they will conquer us: we are diseased, we are developing criminal tendencies, and an alarmingly large percentage of our men and women are sexually impure.

W.E.B. Du Bois, 1897

On History

It is true we are too busy making history, and have been for some years past, to be able to write history yet, or to understand and interpret it.

Anna Julia Cooper, 1892

Beyond the common duties peculiar to woman’s sphere, the colored woman must have an intimate knowledge of every question that agitates the councils of the world; she must understand the solution of problems that involve the alteration of the boundaries of countries, and which make and unmake governments.

Pauline Hopkins, 1902

Dear Spam

I like you.

At your best, you are inventive. At your worst, provocative.

And while I am happy to read you and indulge in our dl love, let’s keep it dl. No need to be brazen about what we do off the page.

On Politics

And yet politics, and surely American politics, is hardly a school for great minds. Sharpening rather than deepening, it develops the faculty of taking advantage of present emergencies rather than the insight to distinguish between the true and the false, the lasting and the ephemeral advantage.

Anna Julia Cooper, “Status of Woman in America” (1892)