Post-Apartheid Same-Sex Sexualities: Restless Identities in Literary and Visual Culture

Abstract

transformation” (168). These cinematic works, as well as the film festival experience, demonstrate that even as queer Africans remain bound to violent heteropatriarchal systems that attempt to erase queerness, there are opportunities from within vulnerability for pleasure and life building, and to anticipate future freedom. Take, for instance, the promotional poster for OFF 2018. As Green-Simms explains, “the Rafiki ticket stub [featured on the poster], which marks the absence of the film itself, is a way of understanding defeat as political potential” (189). Just like the creative, subversive work discussed within, Queer African Cinemas represents the transformative potential of queer scholarship on Africa in the United States and West. I am completely impressed by Green-Simms’s apparent desire to resist conventions of Western queer scholarship, for instance, and her exemplary attention to the intricacies of queer African cultural production, which clearly informs her approach to cinematic close-reading. As a result, she presents to her audience a set of tools for interpreting queer and African art that can be simultaneously, and self-reflexively, applied to cultural analysis in/of the United States and the West. Green-Simms’s writing is wholly accessible, so I anticipate this book being able to impact readers in the academy, as well as beyond.