(Re)storing and (Re)storying men with broken wrists: using intsomi as critical fabulation to refute the notion of queerness as un-African
My research attempts to challenge the contemporary perception of homosexuality as “un-African”. This misconception is often grounded in the perceived absence of queer people of colour from the “archive” of black African (hi)stories that shape our collective understandings of who is and who is not properly “African”. Given that what we do know of how gender is conceived among African societies comes to us predominantly via the colonial archive with all its attendant elisions and lacunae, there is a strong case to be made for treating these histories and the authority they assume in defining our contemporary politics of belonging with some scepticism. Accordingly, I (re)turn to the archive of indigenous African folktales as a means to challenge cultural myths of queer black (un)belonging. In my final thesis project, I take the Xhosa ntsomi (folktale) seriously as a mode of producing and transmitting cultural knowledge and appropriate its formal aesthetics to create queer speculative fictions/myths that subvert neocolonial heteropatriarchy and the attempted erasure of black queer personhood from the story of Africa. Using the culturally embedded formal and narrative tropes of intsomi alongside techniques of biomythography and critical fabulations to queer the neocolonial archive, I work to “(re)store” and “(re)story” black queer African personhood, affirming its complicated place in African society and the visions of freedom and belonging animated by our shared histories of anti-/decolonial struggle.
Intsomi, mystoriography, critical fabulation, Postmemory, archive, repertoire, queer, African, (re)store, (re)story
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