Contested Borders broadens understandings of dissident sexualities in Africa through focusing specifically on the Maghreb where gender/sexual politics have emerged under a different set of historical, material, and ideological conditions compared with sub-Sahara Africa, which has been the focus of much of the scholarship on African sexualities. It examines new representations of same-sex desire emerging in new francophone life writing, memoir, and literature from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, where long-established traditions pertaining to gender and sexuality are brought into contact with new forms of gender and sexual dissidence, resulting from the inflection of globally-circulating discourses and embodiments of queerness in Africa, and from the experience of emigration and settlement by the writers concerned in France. The book analyses how such writers as Rachid O., Abdellah Taia, Eyet Chekib Djaziri, Nina Bouraoui, foreground translation and narrative reflexivity around incommensurable spaces of queerness in order to index their crossings and negotiations of multiple languages, histories, cultures. By writing in French, it argues that these writers are not merely mimicking the language of their former coloniser, but inflecting a European language with vocabularies and turns of phrase indigenous to North Africa, thus creating new possibilities of meaning and expression to name their lived experience of gender and sexual otherness-a form of (queer) translational praxis that destabilises received gender/sexual categories both within the Maghreb and in Europe.
William J Spurlin is Professor of English, Brunel University, London
Acknowledgements/ Introduction/ 1. Sexual/Textual Crossings: New Representations of Sexual Dissidence in the Maghreb/ 2. Historical Antecedents: Imperial Crossings and Same-Sex Desire in North Africa/ 3. Disruption, Fragmentation, and Alternative Sites of Memory: Gender and Sexual Resistance as Historical and Ongoing Forms of Decolonisation in Francophone Writing from the Maghreb/ 4. Queerness Refigured (I): New Negotiations of Gender/Sexual Borders in the Maghreb/ 5. Queerness Refigured (II): Border Crossings and the Racialisation of North African Sexualities in Europe/ 6. Cultural Translation and/as Queer Mediation: Refigured Contradictions, Displacements, and Intersectionalities in the Spaces Between/ Conclusion/References/ Index
Contested Borders is timely and makes an immense contribution to our understanding of queer sexualities in the Maghreb and by extension in Africa. To date, this is the only monograph in English on the Maghreb that brings to our attention important questions of our time: life writing, sites of memory, translation, globalization, and queer theory. William Spurlin's Contested Borders: Queer Politics and Cultural Translation in Contemporary Francophone Writing from the Maghreb is a rigorously researched and critically incisive account of Franco-Maghrebi writing. Spurlin's intersectional analysis is equally attentive to geography, race, gender, sexuality, and language. Simultaneously invoking, departing from, and moving beyond the critical and creative archive of works from the region, the author's attention to new spaces of dissident sexualities leads to future directions for research in the area. Contested Borders is a must read for scholars in Postcolonial, Middle Eastern and North African, and Sexuality Studies. Written in Spurlin's usual deft style, Contested Borders surveys an impressive range of feminist and queer Maghrebian texts, part of the region's long tradition of writing about same-sex desire. The authors of these texts, living in between radically different languages, histories, and cultures, visit upon those uncomfortable with the globe's increasing fragmentation the truths, triumphs, and fragilities of those living beyond essentialized Western categories and indigenous cultural taboos.
