Re-Membering Mwanga, Mourning the Martyrs

The most authoritative textual accounts of the ‘Uganda martyrs’ pivot around the commission of ‘sodomy’ by Kabaka (king) Mwanga with his pages in the 1880s. This chapter asks how commemoration of the martyrdoms coexists with the claim that same-sex intimacy is alien to Ugandan culture. The chapter begins with a methodological discussion of the distinction and overlap between memory and history. It offers a historical account of the production of memory about the martyrdoms from the time of their occurrence to the present. It then offers an ethnographic account of contemporary memorialisation, arguing that Ugandans today relate to the question of sex in the story of the martyrdoms in the modes of disinterest, displacement, denial, and disidentification. Through a mapping of public memory and a historicisation of its narratives, the chapter makes visible the genealogies of homophobia as well as the possibilities for sexual dissidence that lurk within public culture.

The Nation and Its Queers

In 2014, the Supreme Court of India endorsed the demand of trans petitioners for recognition as a ‘backward’ class, entitling them to constitutional guarantees of affirmative action. The equation of transness with backwardness seems to reiterate the ascription of primitiveness to the queer in the colonial archive. In Indian politics, backwardness has different connotations arising out of the struggles of subordinate caste groups. This chapter explores the perils and potentials of the trans claim to backwardness, asking what an appeal to Dalit leader Ambedkar’s politics of futurity means for trans politics. On a parallel register, the chapter explores the relationship between gender identity and backwardness in the imagination of the nation itself, demonstrating how an elite drive for great power status is articulated through the idiom of gender transition. Finally, the chapter reflects on the potentials of gender trouble on both the right and left of the Indian ideological spectrum.

Introduction

The chapter identifies the book’s central question: how does time matter in the queer postcolony? More specifically, how do the afterlives of British colonialism in Uganda, India, and Britain shape contemporary queer politics in each of these locations? It outlines the three principal contributions of the book. First, the book provides an account of the global frictions surrounding Uganda’s Anti Homosexuality Act, demonstrating the ways in which the crisis precipitated by this legislation was generative of new forms of global governmentality around LGBT rights. Second, revitalising thinking around intersectionality, the book demonstrates how queerness functions as a metonym for a range of other identities in different contexts. Third, the book intervenes in a hitherto US-centric queer theoretical literature on temporality to demonstrate how memory and futurity present distinctive battlegrounds for queer postcolonial politics. Finally, the chapter discusses key methodological orientations and problems.

Epilogue

This chapter returns to a puzzle running through the book, namely how to account for the ways in which queerness mutates to become a metonym for imperialism/anti-imperialism, paganism/Christianity, whiteness, embourgeoisement, and backwardness in different institutional configurations of power. Using Hortense Spillers’s historically informed notion of the ‘grammar’ of a state, the chapter argues that these mutations result from a refraction of queerness through the foundational grammar of the institutions being investigated in each chapter. Both states and their antagonists speak in these grammars, making their engagements what Achille Mbembe calls ‘convivial’. The chapter illustrates this with reference to the politics of Uganda. It then summarises its claims about the global frictions surrounding the Anti Homosexuality Act, reiterating the ways in which these frictions illustrate the mutual constitution of core and periphery. It suggests that this insight offers a possible strategy for disorienting orientalism

Queer in the Time of Homocapitalism

In the wake of Uganda’s Anti Homosexuality Act, the World Bank cancelled a loan to the country, precipitating the production of international economic governmentality to promote respect for LGBTI rights, or what this chapter calls ‘homocapitalism’. The chapter reads this development as part of the instrumentalization of gender and sexuality for the rehabilitation of capitalism following the most recent global financial crisis. It argues that the Bank’s efforts to disincentivize homophobia by ascribing it a cost reinforce the hegemony of neoliberal reason. The chapter criticizes the Bank’s culturalist understanding of homophobia, arguing that this allows it to position itself as external to the problem, rather than as implicated in its production. It offers a political economy account of homophobia in Uganda that highlights the relationship between neoliberalism and Pentecostal Christianity, a key vehicle for conservative discourses around sexuality. It concludes with reflections on how homocapitalism might be resisted.

Spectres of Colonialism

Awareness that anti-sodomy laws in the global South are a remnant of British colonialism has generated a discourse of atonement for colonialism among a British political elite not typically known for such contrition. This chapter investigates why this has been the case through a parallel reading of British parliamentary debates on the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade, and on the state of global LGBT rights. Drawing on Melanie Klein’s notion of manic reparation, it demonstrates how elites have sublimated their shame around historic wrongs perpetrated by Britain into moral crusades purporting to remedy them. It then contrasts categorical expressions of atonement for the ‘sexual’ legacies of colonialism with a more ambivalent reckoning with its ‘racial’ legacies. Taking issue with the separation of these analytics, the chapter reveals how atonement for the colonial imposition of anti-sodomy laws abroad is enabled by a whitening of queer suffering at home.

The Location of Homophobia

This chapter criticizes two practices of locating homophobia in space and time, visible in debates surrounding Uganda’s Anti Homosexuality Act. In homonationalist accounts, homophobia is attributed to African tradition. In homoromanticist accounts, it is attributed to Western actors, evidenced by the colonial imposition of anti-sodomy laws and more recent US evangelical Christian-led efforts to institute anti-queer laws in the global South. Both accounts converge in their view of places as discrete entities with distinctive essences. The chapter offers an alternative view of place formation as transnational and temporal, making visible the manner in which place is redefined and stabilized by elites in moments of flux. The argument is illustrated with reference to two such moments in Ugandan history: in the first, homophobia is articulated with imperialist collaboration; in the second, it is articulated with decolonization. In both moments, homophobia emerges as a transnational collaborative construction involving Ugandan and Western elites.