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theses

Diasporic Childhoods examines representations of queer diasporic childhood in twenty-first century transnational African literature—novels, short stories, and memoir—for how they offer ways to reimagine citizenship and belonging for queer Africans that transform historically-accepted interpretations of Africanity in American, African, and African diaspora discourses. It is primarily concerned with how representations of diasporic childhood lead to reimaginings of African continental space in ways that both challenge heteropatriarchal nationalism as it defines postcolonial societies and subvert Western interpretations of Africa as the anti-modern. Their writing reflects a commitment to using the various spaces they occupy and their concurrent migratory experiences to flesh out these reimaginings and to repositioning Africa, diaspora, and queerness in mutual positive relation. A consequence of this transnational framework is that it simultaneously incites new ways of interpreting America and the West within the scope of both domestic and global socio-cultural politics. The writers studied include Uzodinma Iweala, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Chinelo Okparanta, who all work between Nigeria and the United States, as well as Somali-born Diriye Osman, who spent his childhood in Kenya and now resides in England, and the late Kenyan Binyavanga Wainaina, whose work carries us throughout sub-Saharan Africa and the United States.

In each text analyzed, the presence of queer children, and their varying marginalized experiences, reveals the socio-sexual limits of national identity (and its circulations transnationally) as manifested in the diegetic worlds in which they exist. The extents by which representations of queer childhood disrupt these narratives and/or orient the reader towards possibilities outside a narrative’s dominant socio-historical framework, albeit mostly unknown, exemplify an excavation of queer space as an aesthetic methodology in literary studies. By highlighting the imbrications of form, theory, and social practice in literary production and analysis, Diasporic Childhoods presents childhood as a marker of queer space and as an aesthetic device that overlaps with cultural and political investments in queer diaspora as a collective consciousness oriented towards the future and beyond racialized and sexualized forms of oppression.

ETD_11092

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

ETD doctoral

doi:10.7282/t3-ms69-hx19

The author owns the copyright to this work.