1,721,324 research outputs found
Troubled times: disability, sexuality and futurity in Mozambican, Ugandan and Zimbabwean political cultures
No full textSince the earliest days of European expansionism, Africa has held a dual place in the Western imaginary, cast as a space of futurelessness even as white futurities were predicated on its exploitation. Appropriations of the future have persisted post-liberation, revealed in the divestment of futurity from bodies marked as queer or disabled. Drawing on historical moments and literary texts from Mozambique, Uganda and Zimbabwe, and on insights from queer theory, critical race theory and disability studies, I seek to demonstrate that the logics of white supremacy can be seen at work in these mechanisms of exclusion, even where whiteness itself is displaced – but that literary invocation of queerness and disability can thus be used to mobilize critique of this continuity. In centring the circumscription of futurity at the heart of colonialism, heteronormativity and ableism, then, I underscore the critical value of reading these as reciprocal and inextricable systems of power
Undone anatomies: femininity, performativity and parody in Mário de Sá-Carneiro's A Confissão de Lúcio
No full text2014 marked the centenary of the publication of Mário de Sá-Carneiro’s novel A Confissão de Lúcio, a text defined by its complex articulations of sexuality, jealousy, and madness. While traditional analyses of the text underplayed the importance of sexuality and eroticism to the plot, more recent readings have revisited the novel to engage with the latent sexual tension between the novel’s male protagonists. Sá-Carneiro’s use of sexuality and gender as articulated through his two female characters, however, remains overlooked. This study explores the radical possibilities of these intriguing characters, using Judith Butler’s poststructuralist theorization of gender and sexual categories to provide a starting point for the development of new perspectives on Sá-Carneiro’s classic text
Diminished Returns: Mozambican Masculinities in José Craveirinha's Xigubo and Paulina Chiziane's O Sétimo Juramento
Full text linkIn the last fifteen years, gendered analysis of Mozambican cultural expression has become increasingly popular. This engagement with the country's cultural output has successfully elucidated the gendered meanings underpinning both Portuguese colonial endeavour and the Marxist-Leninist rhetoric of the Mozambican anticolonial struggle. However, despite this growing interest in the sexual politics of the nation's cultural texts, Mozambican masculinities remain understudied. This article recentres masculinities in works by two Mozambican authors: poet José Craveirinha, dubbed the founding father of Mozambican national literature, and contemporary novelist Paulina Chiziane, hailed as Mozambique's foremost woman writer. Poststructuralist gender theory is used to propose that Craveirinha's attempt to provide a counter-narration to colonial mythologies of black masculinity through engagement with an aesthetics of negritude ultimately perpetuates imperial imaginings of black femininity. Chiziane's text, meanwhile, is shown to make strategic use of realism and parody in order to satirize the gender politics at the heart of early anticolonial writing
<i>Ana Luísa Amaral: The Art of Being a Tiger: Poems,</i> translated by Margaret Jull Costa
No full textBattleground bodies: Gender and sexuality in Mozambican literature
No full textThis is the first book to comparatively explore the gendered and sexual body in Mozambican literature, engaging in dialogue the work of six authors spanning generations, styles and aesthetics. The study begins by providing a detailed and innovative survey of the dynamics of gender, sexuality and power in the Portuguese colonial and Mozambican post-independence contexts, from the nineteenth century to the turn of the millennium. This initial investigation provides the sociohistorical backdrop for in-depth analyses of representations, uses and subversions of the body in poetry and prose fiction by José Craveirinha, Noémia de Sousa, Lília Momplé, Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa, Paulina Chiziane and Suleiman Cassamo. Using a wide and interdisciplinary range of theoretical frameworks, the book offers a fresh and creative new perspective on Mozambican history, political life and literary output.<br/
Neurodiversity and disability: what is at stake?
No full textNeurodiversity has come hugely to the fore in recent years in a variety of contexts, and is now subject to academic debate, activist discussion, and increasingly embedded in a range of institutional and corporate settings in the Global North, from workplaces to early years education, from psychotherapy to mainstream political discourses. The term has gained traction in Medical Humanities, as well as debate within bioethics, philosophy of psychology, and of law. Institutionally, it is now relied on in therapeutic practice, autism service provision, as well as in higher education, in particular. In this conceptual article we examine what is at stake in these usages and the implications in need of scrutiny. We resituate neurodiversity in relation to questions of disability by examining the deployment of neurology as the basis for identity, rights and benefits. The emergence of the term and the understandings to which it gives rise, we argue, leave out urgent questions of what is at stake for disabled people in a political climate of increasing harshness and ableism
‘Wellbeing’ and the production of disability in the university: erasure, effacement and institutional exceptionalism
No full textThis article uses ‘wellbeing’ as deployed within UK higher education as a starting point for examining the relationship between disability and the university. We explore various strands of scholarship that seek to critique wellbeing, universities, and/or connections between disability and these institutions. Work on ‘wellbeing’ identifies the harmful logics underpinning its political appropriation, but erases disability by declining to consider it as political experience. Critiques of the university efface disability by considering disablement only insofar as it affects the non-disabled, and reify ‘intellect’ as neutral entity and sole true purview of higher education. Work on the political economy of disability exposes crucial connections between disability and capitalism, and the role of economic and political institutions in upholding them, but relies on a distinction between worker and surplus that cannot reckon with institutional complexity. Finally, scholarship that directly confronts the university as disabling institution accounts for complexity, but hinges on an ultimately utopian vision of the university as an exceptional, salvageable space, neglecting key mechanisms by which it continues to marginalise disabled people. We suggest that reaching a fuller understanding of the university as producing disability must involve moving away from this exceptionalism and toward dialogue with critiques of other institutions
Discipline, disease, dissent: the pathologized body in Mozambican post-independence discourse
No full textIn a series of speeches given across the northern reaches of newly independent Mozambique in 1983, president Samora Machel sought to encourage unity among his increasingly disenchanted populace by constructing a common enemy: a figure he often specifically frames as a threat to public health, whether parasite, infection or deformity. This article explores these uses of pathologization and public health by the state and pro-state media during the Mozambican nation-building period, and shows how Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa’s 2013 novel, Entre as Memo?rias Silenciadas, exposes and subverts these associations using the motif of the dissident dying or dead body
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