Workshop: Words in Action? Exploring Local Perceptions of Persuasion and Propaganda as Verbal Performances in Africa

This workshop is organized by the ASCL's Collaborative Research Group Collaboration and Contestation in Words: Dialogues in African Social Realities. There will be two plenary lectures.

Lecture by Harri Englund: Free Speech and the Untranslatable: Homophobic Poetry from Malawi

Public debate and contestation bring to the fore not only the question of free speech, but also matters of translation, not least in Africa’s multilingual polities. Translation across languages would seem to serve the freedom of expression, but it may also suggest that barriers to understanding are linguistic rather than political and historical in nature. Untranslatability, particularly its political and moral sources, can disappear from view. Attempts to translate Malawian homophobic poetry from Chichewa to English show how the linguistic is entwined with the political. Despite writing in Chichewa in a country where English is the official language, the poets address Westerners in their scathing attacks on homosexuals. Rather than focusing on alleged Biblical truths, as pastors might do, the poets criticize homosexuality as a neo-colonial ploy to make freedom and democracy mere smokescreens in Westerners’ quest for a continuing rule over Malawi. Despite the address, the poems are hardly meant to be translated. What moral and political controversies, as well as linguistic challenges, does a foreign anthropologist face when he embarks on translating such poetry? What, if any, sense of free speech is advanced by such a project? Taking my cue from Emily Apter’s critique of Comparative Literature’s assumptions of “cultural equivalence and substitutability” in “the tendency to zoom over the speed bumps of untranslatability in the rush to cover ground,” I argue for translation and untranslatability as central issues in the ethnographies of free speech and public debate.

Lecture by Adriaan van Klinken: “Homophobia is un-African and un-Christian”: Emerging Kenyan, Christian and Queer Counter-Narratives and Arts of Resistance

Popular rhetoric of politicians, religious leaders and other opinion leaders in many African countries has it that homosexuality is “un-African” and “un-Christian”. In the same countries, however, emerging lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) communities, movements and activists are becoming more and more visible, claiming public space, and contesting this popular rhetoric by developing counter-narratives. In this lecture, I explore this dynamic with reference to Kenya, specifically examining a number of creative expressions through which Kenyan LGB actors have recently performed “queer arts of resistance”. In conversation with James Scott’s classic study Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990), I foreground the public transcripts of contemporary Kenyan queer visibility and I distinguish three different modes of resistance – critique, appropriation, and transformation – through which Kenyan LGB actors engage the claims that queer sexuality would be “un-Kenyan”/”un-African” and  “un-Christian”. Drawing on my case studies, I argue that the various forms of Kenyan queer arts of resistance represent the possibility of a black pan-African Christian form of queer imagination and politics, as an alternative to popular homophobic forms of Christianity as well as to mainstream secular forms of LGB activism in Kenya and wider in Africa.

Please register for the workshop before 20 October by sending an e-mail to: Loes Oudenhuijsen.

Speakers

Prof. Dr Harri Englund, Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge

Dr Adriaan van Klinken, Associate Professor of Religion and African Studies at the University of Leeds