The Place Away from Home: Space and Globalization in Queer African Texts

Abstract

This thesis focuses on the spatiality of queer identities in diasporic African and local African texts, linking spaces to anti-universalism. The analysis joins academic conversations relating to the globalization of queer theory, focusing on African authors’ use of spaces occupied by their protagonists. With a combination of close-textual-analysis and comparisons, this thesis, through the use of topoanalysis, analyzes the differences between diasporic and local texts, illustrating the correlation between spaces and the anti-globalization of queer identities.

In the first chapter, the different categories of spaces and space production will be defined, allowing for the introduction of Gaston Bachelard’s topoanalysis as a method for a more specific analysis of spaces to be explored. In addition to examining African queer cultural histories, the concept of queer theory and queer identity will also be defined, providing more specificity to the analysis of the spaces. The primary texts, Iweala’s diasporic novel Speak No Evil and Adichie’s and Arac de Nyeko’s local short stories “Apollo” and “Jambula Tree”, respectively, will be surveyed in the light of the protagonists’ identities.

The second and the third chapters focus on the analysis of the primary works. The second chapter works on Iweala’s novel, extracting the spaces his protagonist occupies while identifying them through Bhabha’s work on the unhomely and Lefebvre’s work on natural spaces. The third chapter processes the same spaces, providing a clear difference between the queer identities of the three texts. In addition, the final chapter will establish the issues that arise with globalizing queer identities, especially when comparing the results of chapter three to Iweala’s novel.

This thesis concludes the correlation between spatiality and anti-globalization of queer African identities through the topoanalysis of spaces in diasporic and local works. The findings of this thesis also point at the correlation between spaces and identities, providing a stable view on the role the imagination plays in one’s experience of spaces.