Sexualities in Africa and the African Diaspora
Research on sexuality in Africa and persons of African descent dispersed across time and space has been characterized by four themes: death, danger, degeneracy, and dearth. Contemporary research has focused on AIDS as originating from and spread by persons of African descent, rape and sexual violence, and the immorality of sexual practices. Particularly for the distant past, scholars bemoan the dearth of primary sources and data to document how persons of African descent conceived of and experiences sexuality. This project aims to broaden research on the history of sexuality in Africa and African diasporas in the Americas and Europe with critical attention to events that forward new epistemological and methodological models of research.
The first symposium for this project, "Sexuality and Colonial Black Atlantic Cities" will be held in the spring 2012. Cities were not new to Africa and the Americas when slave trading and imperialism produced a new phenomenon: the colonial city. Scholars have examined colonial cities as either as a result of "first" colonial empire in the Americas or as the postcolonial aftermath of European colonial expansion in Africa in the twentieth century. Urban studies scholarship often portrays Africans and people of African descent as victims of urbanization or the dysfunction of the city. However, Africans and people of African descent created an indelible mark on modern urban life. As women and men created urban spaces, debates over how sexual mores were to be experienced, regulated, and spatialized were central to town life. The symposium will explore how black historical actors in colonial Africa and the Americas inhabited cities as gendered and affective beings who actively conceptualized ideas about pleasure, desire, and aesthetics. By encompassing the period of colonialism in the Americas and Africa, spanning the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, we will explore what might be called "the Black Atlantic" across varied geographic nodes in the entire Atlantic basin. Topics to be explored include: racialization; aesthetics; marriage and the law; reproductive health; labor and class; the body; families; and same-sex relationships. We aim to issue a call for proposals in the Fall 2011 to scholars within the U.S. and transnationally.
Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Director
Co-convened by Lorelle Semley of Holy Cross, Assistant Professor, Department of History