Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy Across the Black Diaspora

Winner, 2020 Alan Bray Memorial Prize, given by the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association

A new understanding of freedom in the black diaspora grounded in the erotic

In Frottage, Keguro Macharia weaves together histories and theories of blackness and sexuality to generate a fundamentally new understanding of both the black diaspora and queer studies. Macharia maintains that to reach this understanding, we must start from the black diaspora, which requires re-thinking not only the historical and theoretical utility of identity categories such as gay, lesbian, and bisexual, but also more foundational categories such as normative and non-normative, human and non-human. Simultaneously, Frottage questions the heteronormative tropes through which the black diaspora has been imagined. Between Frantz Fanon, René Maran, Jomo Kenyatta, and Claude McKay, Macharia moves through genres--psychoanalysis, fiction, anthropology, poetry--as well as regional geohistories across Africa and Afro-diaspora to map the centrality of sex, gender, desire, and eroticism to black freedom struggles. In lyrical, meditative prose, Macharia invigorates frottage as both metaphor and method with which to rethink diaspora by reading, and reading against, discomfort, vulnerability, and pleasure.

Author: Keguro Macharia
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 11/19/2019
Pages: 224
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9781479865017

Review Citation(s):
Choice 07/01/2020

About the Author
Macharia, Keguro: - Keguro Macharia is an independent scholar from Nairobi, Kenya. He is the author of Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora (NYU Press, 2019).