Queer African Studies: Personhood & Pleasure

I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am. —John Mbiti Let us face it. We are undone by each other. If we are not, we are missing something. —Judith Butler I have been reading bits and pieces of African philosophy focused on the problem of personhood. This particular exploration started when …

Notes Toward a #kenyasyllabus

A syllabus is generative. The framework of readings and activities creates a shared space for thinking and creating. Objects of study produce shared frames of reference—those assembled by those objects may disagree over how those objects mean and work, but the objects create a ground from which to begin and a space to which to …

Political Imagination

If your political hopes and dreams for Kenya were to be realized, how would you experience that Kenya? Describe a typical day in this transformed Kenya in as much detail as possible, from waking up to going to sleep. Describe a typical week in this transformed Kenya in as much detail as possible. Describe a …

Moonlight

Water is another country. --Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return At first, the sound of water. Residence time.1 Black time. Black untime. The memory of water—the memory water has—the memory water is. We keep returning to the water. We keep being returned to the water. A face plunges into ice. Again. my …

Reading Ras Mengesha & Joyce Nyairo

The first section of Ras Mengesha’s The Other Experiment is titled “What We Were Not,” and it moves through scenes of ethnic, gendered, and sexual making and unmaking—declarations of identity in an impossible register (the Somali-named figure who claims to be Kenyan), rituals of intimacy truncated by violence (two men declaring they love each other …

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving TV is terrible: families gather from far-flung places; there are predictable anxieties over whether this or that family member will show up; fights break out over many unreconciled issues; tears flow; and, whether at the beginning, middle, or end of the show, families sit down to eat a meal and someone, usually the matriarch, …

Provisional Notes on Feminism

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we give name to …