Upcoming: Indiscretions at the Intersection of Queer and Postcolonial Theory

Edited by Murat Aydemir

Ross Chambers’ analysis of the gay sexual “tourism” of Roland Barthes, both abroad and at home, stands as a challenge to those assuming that the epistemological and political projects of queer theory and postcolonialism are self-evidently governed by the same spirit, or garner similar effects (Loiterature, 1999, 250-69). According to Chambers, Barthes’ anti-narratives of cruising, whether set in the commercial district of Saint-Germain-de-Près in Paris or in Morocco, studiously “forget” the (post)colonial context that makes young Maghrebi men available for the writer’s melancholic and desirous scrutiny. The dreary and hapless cruising detailed in “Soirées de Paris” furnishes an ongoing story that has no point, that remains pointless; the generous Moroccan sexuality of “Incidents” delivers a series of pointed details without a story. (Both texts are part of the posthumously published collection Incidents, 1992.) The establishment of the urban everyday in the former text and of the exotic in the latter, Chambers argues, are both conditional on the foreclosure of the (post)colonial from bearing on the practices and expressions of gay male desire. Thus, Barthes’ cruising in Paris and Morocco, Chambers concludes, requires “the double forgetting of the colonial.” (258)

Chambers’ analysis may be limited in that it concerns a specific (and perhaps specifically gay male) practice. But Chambers’ reading can also be taken as exemplary in that it foregrounds a set of urgent questions. Does the study of queerness, lesbian, gay, or other, implicitly mandate not getting the (post)colonial point? Conversely, does (post)colonial expertise require one to miss the queer point? And, how can the two be productively and relevantly be recombined? Indiscretions: At the Intersection of Postcolonial and Queer Theory proposes to take to task both theoretical discourses in relation to each other, bearing in mind that that relationship may be intimate, mirroring, conflict-ridden, and/or mutually exclusive. As Chambers asks, “What incidences—interactions, intersections, intrications, mutual interruptions—join them?” (251)

Such questions are especially pressing now that the exoticizing erotics that Barthes exemplifies seem largely superseded by the new islamophobia and racism of Europe (and The Netherlands in particular) that legitimize themselves precisely by citing the attitudes towards (homo-)sexuality of Islamic immigrants. At the same time, the institutionalization of queer theory and postcolonialism as separate areas of specialization has hampered academics in intervening intellectually and activistically in today’s heady concatenation of sexual and cultural issues. The simultaneity of these developments forces a re-evaluation of the pitfalls and possibilities of postcolonial and queer politics in relation to each other.

Contributors: Maaike Bleeker, Merill Cole, Jeffrey Geiger, Ryan D. Fong, Anniko Imre, Jaap Kooijman, Beth Kramer, Michael O'Rourke and Jonathan Mitchell, Lindsey Simms, Nishant Shahani, and Murat Aydemir