Transforming Theory/Transforming Borders: Postcolonial Queer Inquiry and/as a Politics of Decolonization

Abstract

In refusing to (re)produce South Africa as the spectacle of apartheid while being attentive to the historical reality of racial domination and its material effects in an analysis of struggles pertaining to the politics of sexual difference, this book has attempted to engage the useful, but sometimes slippery, cultural and epistemological significations that come about in the engagement of postcolonial/queer as a theoretical mode of inquiry when studying South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy. Because the transition is still ongoing, this has necessitated a contextual analysis of the politics of sexuality within the wider struggle for democratization and the effects of that struggle within the frame of the nation-state, in other parts of the region, and in the larger global sphere. At the same time, this study has not confined itself to the present postapartheid situation alone, but has also examined and critiqued the ways in which earlier historiographic and anthropological studies of nonheteronormative indigenous sexualities in the region have superbly accounted for their historical and cultural difference; yet these studies still fall somewhat short of a more comprehensive analysis of sexual agency and erotic autonomy to the extent that indigenous same-sex bonds are framed and interpreted through a trace of heteronormative assumptions.