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Winner, 2020 Alan Bray Memorial Prize, given by the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association
A new understanding of freedom in the black diaspora grounded in the erotic
In Frottage, Keguro Macharia weaves together histories and theories of blackness and sexuality to generate a fundamentally new understanding of both the black diaspora and queer studies. Macharia maintains that to reach this understanding, we must start from the black diaspora, which requires re-thinking not only the historical and theoretical utility of identity categories such as gay, lesbian, and bisexual, but also more foundational categories such as normative and non-normative, human and non-human. Simultaneously, Frottage questions the heteronormative tropes through which the black diaspora has been imagined. Between Frantz Fanon, René Maran, Jomo Kenyatta, and Claude McKay, Macharia moves through genres—psychoanalysis, fiction, anthropology, poetry—as well as regional geohistories across Africa and Afro-diaspora to map the centrality of sex, gender, desire, and eroticism to black freedom struggles. In lyrical, meditative prose, Macharia invigorates frottage as both metaphor and method with which to rethink diaspora by reading, and reading against, discomfort, vulnerability, and pleasure.
"Frottage is an important and field-changing book. One of Keguro Macharia’s great talents is to guide us to a way to understand, read, and think differently about kinship, about gender, about ‘thinghood,’ and about intimacy. Macharia is a profoundly original thinker and writer and in Frottage he renders and imagines diaspora in ways that attend beautifully to a range of world-making practices, to geo-histories and discontinuities. The final chapter, both meditation and invitation, is a gift."
"Frottage raises fundamental questions about ways of seeing and living sexual difference – in this case queer sexuality – in a world that by virtue of its language, expectations, actions and general beliefs, tends to homogenise sexuality in a heteronormative sense. [...] Keguro is searching for how to articulate ‘queer’ in an African and Afrodiasporic world that disavows not just the practice but the very word and identity."
"Frottage is an important addition to theoretical work that makes it possible to think about black and queer subjectivities in Africa and the African diaspora."