Being an African: some queer remarks from the margins

• Main Author: Paul Prinsloo
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Key Words; Africanisation; counter-narrative; identity; postcolonial theory; queer; North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.539.7920; http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/mcb-prinsloo-100809.pdf

The University of South Africa (Unisa) has embarked on an official Africanisation process impacting on staff composition and curricula. This paper critically engages the construct of an assumed African identity from a specific personal location shaped by seemingly incommensurable characteristics of race, gender, culture, religion and location. This paper firstly proposes Africanisation as a necessary counter-narrative to the historical and continuing hegemony of North Atlantic epistemological and ontological canons, with the aim of decentring Western descriptions of African identity. Africanisation can secondly be understood as a discourse of perpetual longing for a quintessential African identity and culture as archaeological project searching for and falling back on archives of identity and belonging. A third option for defining Africanness involves a palimpsest approach where the project is not to deconstruct and de-layer the different gestalts of identity in order to discover the "original " but define identity as dynamically constructed and fluid at a specific time and place where identities are marked by a multiplicity of subject positions. This paper proposes identity, and the African identity, as neither fixed nor singular; but rather as a constantly changing relational multiplicity. But during the course of such flux identities do assume specific patterns, as in a kaleidoscope, against particular sets of personal, social and historical circumstances.