Queer African literary communities: The anthology as political genre

Abstract

The inaugural Gerald Kraak anthology titled Pride and Prejudice (The Gerald Kraak Anthology: African Perspectives on Gender, Social Justice and Sexuality) (2017) is a collection of poetry, fiction, journalism, photography, and scholarly writing that focuses on queer and other marginalised identities in Africa. The individual contributions place the queer cultural outsider at the centre of the text. The power of the anthology’s collective voice challenges normative subjectivity and its practices of exclusion by showcasing the subjects’ joy and suffering, and, through the collectivisation of individual experience, new possibilities arise for a recentred queer subjectivity that challenges imposed normative boundaries. The process of writing is a relatively private activity to explore and express identity and sexuality. In contrast to the privacy of writing is the act of sharing this writing with an audience that witnesses these private and often hidden identities and sexualities. This article focuses on how this anthologised collection of marginalised cultural ‘others’ shifts the borders of what is considered deviant by reading the entries through Judith Butler’s concepts of ‘legibility’, where the outsider is placed at the narrative centre. Contribution: This article contributes to studies on marginality, queer African literature, genre and anthologies.

Keywords

• african literature
• anthology
• citationality
• genre
• intelligibility
• legibility
• marginalisation
• queer studies