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WOMEN AND GENDER Neville Hoad. African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. xxxiii + 187 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $20.00. Paper.
African Intimacies both engages the historical and social narratives surrounding homosexuality as a cultural signifier in sub-Saharan Africa (with particular emphasis on southern Africa) and simultaneously investigates the place of homosexuality in the material and discursive production of Africa. While chronicling the historical shifts in relations between homosexuality and African politics over the last century, Neville Hoad does not claim to write a linear history of homosexuality in sub-Saharan or southern Africa; instead he focuses on carefully selected moments of crisis, or "flashpoints," from which to analyze the place of homosexuality within a range of ideological conditions and signifying practices related to a legacy of imperialism, nationalist discourses of decolonization striving toward a sense of African "authenticity," and the current HIV/AIDS crisis in South Africa-all of which, in varying ways, have challenged singular meanings of homosexuality in Africa and of African-ness itself. This book is important because it attempts to account for the multiple, often contradictory, meanings of African male same-sex intimacies. This distinguishes Hoad's approach from imperial legacies and more recent cultural nationalist discourses in Africa, both of which have attempted to assign a unitary, singular meaning to samesex intimacies between men, under the tropes of sexual excess or Western decadence, respectively.
What I found most informative about African Intimacies was the historical work on Mwanga, the last indigenous ruler (kabaka) of Buganda. In 1886 Mwanga had more than thirty pages executed for refusing to have anal sex with him after their conversion to Christianity, an event that simultaneously facilitated a shift in power from indigenous to...