Postcolonial/sexuality, or, sexuality in “Other” contexts: Introduction

Our decision to think about sexuality and postcolonial texts and contexts through the frameworks of sexual dissidence as well as queer theory calls for a brief pause on their differences and similarities, given they meet and diverge in this special focus’s articles. Sexuality is interconnected with categories of gender, race and class, through which it is constituted, and identities and meanings are subject to material and ideological change. In setting out the parameters for defining the term “sexual dissidence”, Jonathan Dollimore outlined the “perverse dynamic”. Cultural change, including that to do with the conceptualization of sexuality, in part occurs because the “antithetical inheres within, and is partly produced by, what it opposes” (1991, 34). Sexual dissidence, then, can be understood as a challenge in part enacted by or through what constitutes the normative; the disordering of gender, race and class “perverts” the normative sexual order, albeit that these broad axes of analysis can and do overlap in ways that mean “the antithetical” is not always a matter of simple observation. “Ethnic” and “racial” Others produced in the context of colonization can function similarly as disruptive to the colonial order, indeed interconnectedly, through categories of sexuality, gender and class. There are then, some parallels in broad patterns of othering, and, as such, they raise inevitable invitations to comparison. But such comparisons only promise revelation if they are not plotted on a pre-existing and stable matrix. While there is no glorious past of precolonial gender and sexual equality, it is the case that colonization shaped gender and sexual subjectivity, through extensive material upheaval, through the imposition of shaming colonial ideals of heteronormativity and elite responses to them, and, more formally, through law (Rao 2012). Following the cultural, political and legal battles of minoritized sexual others in the global north, and the absorption of the narrative of sexual freedom into broader Euro-American discourses of liberalism, migrant Others from the former colonies are now constructed as particularly homophobic and repressive of women (Puar 2007, 22). If freedoms of gender and sexuality extended to minoritized people have been co-opted by former colonial powers as emblematic, their fragility – revealed in contemporary regressive US state policies – should serve as warning against political complacency. As readers of postcolonial texts, we are particularly interested in the way that historical change has been and continues to be shaped by colonial capitalism and its Eurocentric conceptual frames, as well as the way local absorption of, and resistance to, that change reproduces ideology unevenly, in diverse forms. Broad patterns structuring the antithetical, then, produce postcolonial sexual dissidence in relation to local and historically constructed categories of gender, race, ethnicity and class. Drawing attention to “the complex dialectic between centres and margins, dominant and subordinate cultures, conformity and deviance” (Dollimore 1991, 27) which long precedes postmodernism and is inherent to cultural change, Dollimore identifies

a kind of transgression enabled rather than thwarted by the knowledge that there is no freedom outside history, no freedom within deluded notions of autonomous selfhood. In short, the paradoxical dynamics of perversion in its pre-sexological senses enable an account of dissidence within sexuality which is not – hopefully can never again be – confined to sexuality. (1991, 34)

The insistence on the parameters of history for the conceptualization of sexual dissidence and freedom is central to the way texts are approached in this special focus, across the range of postcolonial locations. Meg Wesling, for example, reads James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room as “a novel about queer diasporic consciousness” in the context of exploring post-war US “state-building and imperial conquest”, while Ronald Cummings reads the work of Dionne Brand and José Esteban Muñoz as writing which “rearticulate[s] various Third World social revolutions as part of their examination of queer possibilities, practices and narratives”. Sita Balani and Shamira Meghani find mid- and late-20th-century political narratives of gay identity employed in the work of straight male South Asian diasporic writers in the 21st century, while Humaira Saeed identifies the way 20th-century political dissent is mediated narrowly as freedom in the transnational frameworks of Shyam Selvadurai’s The Hungry Ghosts. By contrast, Feras Alkabani argues that in its sympathetic treatment of a queer, androgynous character during the Lebanese Civil War, Hoda Barakat’s The Stone of Laughter is one example of a new political turn in the history of Arab postcolonial queer representation, which at the same time appears to take subtle cues from pre-modern homoerotic Arabic writing. The title for this special focus thus indicates the particular way that articles engage with sexuality in postcolonial writing. Eschewing questions of authenticity, authors explore the role of queer representation in racial and gendered subjectivity, as well as the way queerness inhabits and articulates “other” political issues. The articles are concerned, then, with what the texts are doing or attempting to do, in the context of their particular cultural norms. In noting this we draw attention to the importance articles place on historical understanding and context and the way that texts call on history. Implicitly they are concerned with what Raymond Williams (1977) refers to as the “structures of feeling” and Edward Said (1984) as the “worldly” nature of texts: that texts are “part of the social world, human life and of course the historical moments in which they are located and interpreted” (4). In many ways these interests and concerns situate the articles within recent critiques that draw attention to the dominance of post-structuralism within postcolonial studies and invite materially informed analysis (Lazarus 2011). The texts and contexts to which the present articles give focus explore a range of concepts and facets of sexuality that articulate dissent, and in their own ways make demands for cultural and political change. Yet as the articles all examine representations directly or obliquely focused on non-heteronormative sexuality in postcolonial locations that are marked by the politics of their particular regional contexts, including the particulars of responding to racial, sexual and class constructions, they are also informed by queer theory, which has in part taken shape through post-structuralism. This is not without its problems. “Queer” and the theoretical frames associated with it have often resisted definition in favour of a “provisional political” identity (Sullivan 2003, 44). David Halperin has described “queer” as

by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. ‘Queer’ then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative [ ... ].[Queer] describes a horizon of possibility whose precise extent and heterogeneous scope cannot in principle be delimited in advance. (1995, 62)

In her critical account, Nikki Sullivan (2003) goes on to note that such “vague and indefinable” (43) descriptors risk unifying where there are in fact multiple differences of sexual and gender identity, including differences in expression within different ethno-racial groups, as Gloria Anzaldúa noted (2009, 164). What is vague and undefinable becomes associated with “unacknowledged meanings [ ...  which] tend to privilege the values, desires, and aspirations of particular people and groups, and to overlook, or silence those of others” (Sullivan 2003, 48). While provisional and coalitional formations of queer may at times have utility for interpreting postcolonial literary framings of the anti-normative, the unacknowledged assumptions of white Eurocentric or North American identity that inhabit queer theory tend to travel with it, unannounced, defining the non-normative in pre-codified, imperialistic terms. It is worth noting here, then, how what Alan Sinfield refers to as “faultline stories” which address “awkward, unresolved issues” in our ideological formation through the retelling and reorganizing of the shape of stories (1994, 4), appear in varied ways in many of the texts the articles explore, but particularly with regards to the uses of identity: the way complex queer histories relate to contemporary texts, and the way that the “coming out” story appears.

Underlining reading as a collaborative activity, Sinfield’s (1992) critique of professional literary criticism that claims to be subversive despite seeming to be “designed to head off such political potential” as literary study may have, and “to trap understanding within a closed system” (288–289), is an instructive cue for us in thinking about how postcolonial texts are written and read in relation to the dynamic between dominant contexts and subcultures. In this we are reclaiming the study of sexual dissidence in its British cultural materialist model (Hall et al. [1980] 2005), through, in part, “subcultural allegiances” (Sinfield 1992, 291).¹ These should not in themselves be interpreted to mean uncritical commitment, and not least because, in our experience, subcultures are in themselves dynamic contexts for critique and interpretation. In addition, the texts our authors have chosen to examine are themselves situated in historical, cultural and material contexts; their critical interpretations are situated in the texts’ contexts of production, and examined through the dynamics of debate running through subcultures contending with hegemony. Ethnic and sexual subcultures, and non-white gender and sexual subcultures, are themselves the site of lively debate on questions that concern our contributors’ work and subject positions. In part, our selection of articles suggests that in the context of postcolonial Britain, where this special focus has been edited, some of the abstractions of Eurocentric queer theory may limit enquiry. Thus we find postcolonial, diaspora and race-critical queer theory to be helpfully instructive for drawing out relationships between sexuality, ethno-racial contexts, and the uneven unfolding of global capitalism as they appear in the primary texts discussed in this collection.²

Existing queer of colour critical and scholarly writing on literature and culture takes shape for us through Audre Lorde, whose 1977 paper at the Modern Language Association insists that “your silence will not protect you” and urges “the transformation of silence into language and action” (Byrd, Cole, and Guy-Sheftall 2011, 40). It includes the work of Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar (1984), bell hooks (1989), Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), Kobena Mercer (1991, 1994), Gayatri Gopinath (2005), Martin Manalansan (2006), and José Esteban Muñoz (1999, 2009). More recently the project to decolonize sexuality locally and transnationally has been taken up in an edited collection by Sandeep Bakshi, Suhraiya Jivraj, and Silvia Posocco (2016; see also https://decolonizingsexualities.com/). In varied ways these critics have worked to read and rethink “queer” back into ethno-racial cultural production, and our authors attempt to extend aspects of this work. Our special focus’s interest in the way that the writing of dissident sexuality remains a site through which dissidence of other kinds is articulated, and a site constituted through gender, race, class and postcolonial formations, leads us to employ aspects of critical work drawing on multiple traditions. We note, then, that some queer of colour scholarship overlaps with developments in queer materialism (Floyd 2009), which informs our understanding of the power of queer social formations and what their presence or absence means in cultural texts. As Nadja Millner-Larsen and Gavin Butt have noted more recently, “queer studies has also deepened its account of political economy by taking on the sexual economies of neoliberalism, global migration, and the intimacies of social reproduction” (2018, 403); in advocating the “queer commons” they remind us that “queer activism – not to mention queer life – is a particularly rich resource for imagining, experimenting with, and enacting the improvisational infrastructures necessary for managing the unevenness of contemporary existence” (2018, 400).

History

Postcolonial criticism has a long tradition of engagement with historical contexts, as it (re-)evaluates and critiques legacies of empire. Colonial context and discourse can be engaged with as that which introduced substantial structural oppressions, and which necessitated the development of cultures and instances of resistance. We were keen that the articles in this special focus would maintain historically and contextually sensitive approaches, and each can be seen to build on and develop scholarship on the connections between colonial discourse and sexuality. There is an established foundation for these conversations, with Anjali Arondekar (2009), Ronald Hyam (1990), Christopher Lane (1995) and Robert J.C. Young (1995), among others, emphasizing the ways in which knowledge production around sexual dissidence and colonial expansion intersected with and depended on one another. More specifically, the development of medical discourses on sex and sexuality (Foucault 1978), as they advanced alongside those of scientific racism, can be seen as informing justifications for colonial expansion. Indeed, as Ann Laura Stoler (1995) has proposed, the development of a European discourse on sexuality must be understood in direct relation to colonial enterprises. Building on this historically situated foundation, Humaira Saeed (2017) has argued for placing sexuality “as integral to discussions of postcolonialism as considerations of the nation state, the globalization of capital, and the rise of secularism” (278).

Colonial discourse constructed colonies as sexually permissive societies that were simultaneously childlike in their need of control; this dichotomy was understood as the colonies offering opportunities for sexual “adventure”, which Robert Aldrich (2002) has reluctantly acknowledged as “a paradigm of European men taking advantage of the colonial situation” (367). This exploitative dimension where sexual experiences become complicit with the colonial enterprise (Levine 2006; Massad 2007; Boone 1995; McClintock 1995), and the related shift to the alleged repression of sexual freedoms in the same sites (Massad 2007; Rao 2014), echo across a number of the texts discussed in this issue. Articles taken together in this special focus develop what we might call a postcolonial methodology, by calling on history in innovative ways.

Balani outlines the ways in which the war on terror is reliant upon a sexualized racism, developed through colonial discourse, as argued by Spivak (1998) in her crucial discussion of colonial interpretations of the practice of sati in India which rendered South Asians as beholden to archaic traditions. Balani builds on this to frame the treatment of South Asians through the discourse of the War on Terror. Where Spivak was concerned with the gendered dynamics of the representation of widow immolation, Balani turns the lens to how writers now navigate the spectre of the erotic. In her article, Balani emphasizes the absence of the erotic in texts that are concerned with sexuality, positing that this reflects an anxiety in South Asian writers not to be rendered as either sexually passive, or sexually perverse, as colonial writers and thinkers asserted. Similarly, Meghani looks at how colonial sexual fantasies inform the ways that protagonists are situated in texts by South Asian writers, emphasizing that the continuity of colonization can be felt keenly in the bedrooms of the diaspora. Where Balani uses the context of the War on Terror, Meghani looks further back to the Cold War in order to situate their discussion within the framework of cultural surveillance. By drawing connections between US and British Cold War state-led surveillance on gay men, they develop connections between subjectivities that have been constructed as enemies of the state at various times. In the third article on a South Asian text in this special focus, Saeed also refers to colonial sexual fantasies, as Selvadurai’s protagonist Shivan is fetishized and expected to adhere to exoticized expectations during sexual encounters. Here, it is contemporary white Canadians who promulgate these stereotypes, evidencing once again the resilience of colonial sexual fantasies. As in Balani’s discussion in which South Asian men internalize these tropes, Saeed points to the damage these experiences cause, when internalized by the queer migrant. Together, these three articles, focused as they each are on South Asian texts, work against what Jasbir Puar (1998) notes as a tendency to frame “South Asian as reducible to Indian” (411), and each notes the toxic effects of a subcontinent being responded to as static.

Alkabani also engages with reductive orientalist depictions of Arabic sexuality as a fixed entity that is both repressed and lascivious, while also gesturing towards the multiplicity of literary engagement with homo/sexuality. Through a detailed evaluation of homosexuality/homoeroticism in Arabic literature that dates back to the 8th century, he shows the disjunctures between these and more contemporary representations. He uses this to address assumptions of progress, as more recent texts are evaluated as being reductive in their depictions; this offers us a way to view and appraise Barakat’s fiction as departing from contemporary tropes in offering a more nuanced queer representation. Where contemporary Arab fiction carries the weight of colonial assumptions and knowledge production around sexuality, Alkabani uses historical context to read protagonist Khalil’s sexual dissidence as a form of resistance that is rendered impossible within the war time context. Cummings’s use of history also foregrounds resistance, generating an argument that articulates a desire for new political possibilities that draw from the past, arguing through Muñoz and Brand that anti-colonial histories and practices prove useful in constructing queer possibilities and futures. To place revolutionary legacies of anti-colonial thought in conversation with sexuality discourse, Cummings calls on the Maroon – the runaway slave – arguing that this historical figure articulates an ethos of anti-colonial resistance. In so doing, Cummings posits that Muñoz enacts an archival turn to the traces of Third World political and anti-colonial thought that contribute to his queer future visions; as such, what Muñoz articulates in terms of queer futurity is also part of the history of postcolonial thought and practices of Third World movements.

Offering a different approach, Wesling’s article demonstrates how the weight and legacy of history can be seen across both text and writer. Her exploration here pushes us to think of the ways the history of French colonialism informs protagonist David’s privileges, subjectivity and attitude towards his queerness. But also, she shows how Baldwin as a writer is intrinsically connected to this dynamic through legacies of slavery, choosing here to home in on the damage that the historical construction of whiteness promulgates. David’s inherited white masculinity is understood as being built upon legacies of settler colonialism and US militarism, which in turn structure his inability to access his own desires. Wesling here argues that the history of Euro-American imperialism and segregation causes any engagement with same-sex desire to take on a racialized dimension, and shows that the intimate field of sexuality is inextricably linked to the dynamics of US state-building and citizenship as well as the maintenance of the French colonial regime.

Authenticity

If the writing of postcolonial sexuality is generally beset by expectations of not only “authentic” minoritized others, and also perhaps, given the often flattening assumptions about where queer liberty resides in global geography (Meghani 2015, 64–65; Rao 2015), of “authentic” and confirming descriptions of homophobia, many of the texts that the articles explore resist providing the reader with an exotic “sexual subaltern” (Kapur 2005). Rather, what the articles show is the way that queer gender and sexuality function in narrative to reflect collective as well as individual experience in complex ways. Queerness can, for example, constitute the wider political discourse or moment. Alkabani’s discussion of Barakat’s surrealist novel demonstrates the textual parallels between Khalil’s queerness and androgyny, and ability to see beyond the complacency of others, during the Lebanese civil war. Khalil, Alkabani argues, undergoes a kind of psychosexual moral decay into violence that constitutes excessive, yet normative, heteropatriarchy, positioning the sensitive, observant queer as the text’s moral centre, and overturning the clichés of queerness as moral decay, an association made by much postcolonial Arabic writing on homosexuality. Cummings, by contrast, demonstrates the way desire between women is articulated through the collective pasts of dissent, in both revolution and marronage, to anticipate possible queer futures. In both articles the textual figures of queerness invoke ideal wider political imaginaries. Wesling’s examination of the constitutive nature of black diasporic queerness in the mid-20th-century US and France reveals the character of David in Giovanni’s Room as an unstable figure of whiteness. She argues that David is unable in part to produce a stable sexual self because his queerness implies racialization.

By contrast, the “coming out” narrative, often the site through which the authenticity of singular forms of sexual identity is articulated (Saxey 2008), is exploited in varied ways in texts that three of the articles discuss. As constructions of race, ethnicity and “westernness”, they seem to be referring back to 20th-century political discourse, albeit in different ways. Alan Sinfield’s (1996) argument that discourses of ethnicity and diaspora had informed gay and lesbian political organizing in western democracies is instructive here. Through what Sinfield refers to as the “ethnicity-and-rights model” (272) lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) identities gained a political kinship to ethnic minorities. Essentially, by contrast to earlier LGBT activism’s focus on sexual liberation for all, political battles for black civil rights in the US and racial equality in the UK formed the basis for sexual minorities’ struggles for equality, in this process giving sexual identity a distinct terminology and a more coherent political shape. This coherent political shape has, however, been absorbed into narratives of whiteness and “westernness” as an emblem of secular liberty, giving rise to a queer imperialism which positions non-white populations, and especially those associated with religious, particularly Muslim, cultures as necessarily homophobic (Haritaworn, Tauqir, and Erdem 2008). However, it becomes clear, through the work of Balani and Meghani, that texts exploring the constraints for ethnic minority masculinity have borrowed the dominant gay discourse of “coming out”, in part popularized through the “ethnicity-and-rights” model, and in part as a narrative of whiteness. Productive in narratives of both finding interracial heterosexual “truth”, and in articulating the effects of cultural surveillance, the uses of “coming out” in narrative suggest both reappropriation and strategy, modes which, to a certain extent, may be inevitable for texts conceived of and situated very much within democratic culture and its many contestations.

Balani shows that the memoirs of prominent South Asian men are mobilized by a “coming out” narrative in which a revealed sexual “truth” confronts “tradition”. In this case, narratives of sexual formation reveal only the banal sexual truth that Asian men desire and imagine their normative futures with white women, a trope that conforms to colonial sexual ideology. Racialized desire, it should be remembered, has a literary history in the voice of non-white men which goes back to at least the 1950s and Sam Selvon, amongst others. Meghani argues that the “coming out” narrative has, in texts negotiating post-9/11 Islamophobia, served to give shape to and show the intimate conditioning effects of sustained, racialized cultural surveillance. State surveillance of sexual minorities during the Cold War, as Sinfield (1997) has shown elsewhere, is what brought previously submerged discourses of homosexuality to political attention as the risk of “queer treachery” against the “Western Alliance” (76). The effects of the widespread assumption of what might be called “Muslim treachery” is in part revealed through parallel strategies of reader textual surveillance on straight Muslim South Asian, and gay white, men. While these very different textual strategies – which ultimately emerge from queer organizing and discourse – highlight the inevitable overlaps in political strategy that emerge in democratic cultures, their use in narrative comes at the cost of queer diasporic representation. Queer diasporic subjects, as Gayatri Gopinath (2005) has shown in the context of South Asian US public cultures, become unintelligible within the demands of dominant discourse. In her discussion of queer migration, and drawing also on the “ethnicity-and-rights model” for sexual minorities, as well as the inevitable exclusions, Saeed, in her article in this special focus, explores the mythologies of migration, homonormativity and capitalism. Following the critique of Anne-Marie Fortier, Eithne Luibhéid (2008) and Martin Manalansan (2006), that “sexual migration” (Fortier 2003) is commonly but problematically conceived as a journey towards a better, more liberated place, Saeed argues that the novel The Hungry Ghosts participates in such conceptualization, under the banner of fatalism. Her reading observes that the novel’s staging of a conflation of hard-won queer subcultures and whiteness, as emblematic of US liberty, elides the struggles by which subcultures have formed, even as the text reveals the narrow meaning of liberty for those who are racialized. Further, Saeed points to the ways in which protagonist Shivan’s understanding of himself is developed through seeing images of white gay men in mainstream US publications, leading him to understand his authentic self as something that can only be accessed in North America.

What characterizes the articles is their perhaps unfashionable commitment to expanding concepts of freedom, not abstractly, but as the texts articulate it, even contradictorily, problematically, as to be considered within lived experience. Queerness is sexual and other dissidence in many of the texts discussed, and its referents are often a clear critique of the postcolonial present.

Movement and diaspora

The field of queer diaspora has developed as a way of thinking about same-sex desire within the framework of relocation, immigration and exile, enabling critics to address both queer spaces within ethnically defined diasporas, and transnational networks of queer cultures (Fortier 2002). Further, the field shows an interest in “exploring nation and migration as gendered concepts that are implicated in ethnocentric, heteronormative, and patriarchal regimes of power” (Parker 2011, 644). As well as speaking directly to the existence of diaspora and migration in relation to queer individuals and cultures, queer diaspora studies has had broader implications. Gayatri Gopinath (2011), as a key thinker in the development of this field, argues that “[t]he scholarship has provincialised the white normativity of queer studies and the heteronormativity of diaspora studies, and has instead made questions of sexuality, racialisation, colonialism, migration, and globalisation central to both a queer and a diaspora studies project” (635–636). Articles within the special focus build on this intervention through attending to absences in (white) queer work and (straight) migration/postcolonial work, or, in Kunstman and Miyake’s (2008) words: “We believe that raciality and queerness should always be interrogated together as queerness/raciality in order to hear the invisible, to see the inaudible” (7). Following Avtar Brah (1996), whose concept of “diaspora space” is as much to do with those who have migrated as those who remain in the site of origin or “home”, authors explore the various ways in which sexuality, racialization and migration are imbricated in one another.

Cummings’s contribution here is concerned with movement in a number of ways; in his article, flight, as migration and marronage, reflects a desire for movement, escape and new possibilities. Through this desire, Cummings articulates an interest in unpacking dissatisfaction with the here and now, both geographical and temporal in Muñoz’s and Brand’s work. He asks what queer/postcolonial analysis is produced when texts foreground struggle, thus framing Verlia’s desire for flight from Canada in In Another Place, Not Here as a mediation of Maroon flight, rather than a more reductive nostalgic migration. This focus on movement takes Cummings beyond narratives that might straightforwardly position queerness in oppositional terms to the postcolonial and which often read postcolonial and Third World contexts as inherently anti-queer. Instead, then, this article looks to the ways that Brand and Muñoz locate queer in Third World revolution while also holding the masculinist blind spots of these movements’ narratives.

Meghani’s contribution to the special focus also engages with texts that centre diaspora in distinct ways: in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Changez tells his story as a Pakistani in America, outlining his US experiences to an American while in Lahore, gesturing to the multiple journeys and positions that migratory movement generates. In How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position, by contrast, the diaspora location is Denmark, bringing the concerns of post-imperial social democracy to bear on non-anglophone contexts. In Meghani’s argument “culture talk” becomes linked to diasporic and other subcultures, where only certain cultures are marked as such, thereby foregrounding the negotiations and isolations that emerge through belonging to a culture. Balani’s argument connects with Meghani’s as she outlines how South Asian diasporic communities become situated as insular and distinct from a white British mainstream, and protagonists respond to the anxieties caused due to British Asian diaspora communities being associated with figures such as the home-grown terrorist. Diaspora as a concept is also engaged with in terms of imagined communities around subculture: Manzoor’s discovery of Bruce Springsteen, for example, enables access to a subcultural community with its own structures of conditional belonging.

Approaching the cost of movement across borders from another angle, Saeed asks what analysis is produced when texts draw on myths of migration: movement from the postcolony to the western imperial centre holds within it the promise of privilege and whiteness, yet, as explored here, this is frustrated because movement does not mean an escape from racialization and global power dynamics. While movement to new spaces holds the promise of fresh points of connection and of new imagined communities, Saeed’s analysis of the protagonist’s journey emphasizes how individuals cannot necessarily access this promise, and the home of origin is never simply left behind. In short, both Balani and Saeed demonstrate how migration and diaspora are affected by existing scripts and are never without cost. The movement of cultures across borders causes both opportunity and anxiety that cannot be separated from racialization, and again sexuality is at the core of this. Indeed, through the connections drawn in this special focus we see how movement does not necessarily generate freedom. In Saeed’s discussion, the promise of freedom is undermined by the sustained racism that protagonist Shivan both experiences and internalizes, thus rendering his home culture as without value. In Wesling’s article queers exist in tension with notions of home and nation, as sexual normativity is a nation-building and imperial project, or, in Balani’s words: “Western state-building projects are managed by sexual as well as racial hierarchies.” Concerns regarding the sexual sphere are then understood as to do with problems within one’s nation of origin or culture, particularly explored in the articles analysing texts from the South Asian diaspora: Balani’s, Meghani’s and Saeed’s articles all navigate the concerns and anxieties that are generated when the home culture becomes fixed as repressive.

Wesling’s article, on the other hand, considers what is to be gained in deploying diasporic theories and approaches to analysis of texts that do not straightforwardly fit under the heading of diaspora fiction. In developing the concept of a “queer diasporic consciousness” attributable to James Baldwin, Wesling argues that he uses David’s movement to offer a critique of imperialist nation building. Where David cannot be understood as a queer diasporic figure, diasporic critique can be used to interrogate his position as a privileged white male citizen who moves because of his sanctioned homosexual desire. Wesling proposes here that state building functions through heteronormativity and whiteness, and these imperial norms create David as an outsider because of his queer desires, rather than because of his migratory journey.

Gender

Following the lead of Avtar Brah (1996), who describes her influential Cartographies of Diaspora as concerned with the “multiaxiality of power” (16), taking as it does the politics of intersectionality to new horizons and depths, the articles in this special focus are concerned with power dynamics on multiple levels. It is telling that arguments that are centred around a critique of white heteropatriarchy are most focused on men and/or masculinity, whereas those that appraise what representations of sexuality can offer in terms of resistance have a stronger engagement with women and/or the feminine. While our concern in the special focus is on sexuality, this is inextricably linked to gender, and as such the meditation offered on gender works to home in on what is at stake in representations of sexuality in postcolonial contexts.³ For as Chandra Mohanty (2003) reminds us, “the interwoven processes of sexism, racism, misogyny, and heterosexism are an integral part of our social fabric, wherever in the world we happen to be” (3).

Anne Fausto-Sterling (1995) has explored the ways in which colonial expansion was informed by a preoccupation with sex and sexual difference, identifying feminist concerns as crucially needed at the heart of postcolonial analysis. Anne McClintock has also outlined the ways in which Victorian attitudes towards sexuality and domesticity informed systems of domination within the British Empire, with both McClintock and Said ([1978] 1995) emphasizing how the colonies and colonized peoples were conceptualized as feminized spaces, which is part of their allure and availability. Mohanty (2003, 60) has further discussed how colonial projects were organized around gendered assumptions and anxieties. These sexualized epistemologies must be acknowledged for any discussion of sexuality in postcolonial contexts, especially, as outlined by Puar (2011): “in the colonial period, the question of ‘how do you treat your women?’ as a determining factor of a nation’s capacity for sovereignty has now been appended with the barometer of ‘how well do you treat your homosexuals?’ ” (139). The relation, then, of feminist concerns to queer conversations is clearly charted in each of the authors’ arguments.

In Alkabani’s discussion, for example, protagonist Khalil is a genderqueer figure rendered impossible within the masculinist context of war. Here masculinity is centred in order to be critiqued for its toxic strands, a similar move made in the moments where Cummings critiques the reification of Maroon resistance as a masculinist enterprise. Alkabani explores how the narrator celebrates Khalil’s femininity and mourns the loss of this when he becomes a violent macho figure at the novel’s close; in this, the tragic victory of the social order is demonstrated through gender. Khalil’s gender throughout the majority of the novel remains complex through maintaining a duality, such as his self-description as a “wife of the wrong gender”, a quotation that holds his position as a woman (as a wife) but also as a man (as he is the “wrong gender”), through which a non-binary gender takes shape. Crucially, Alkabani’s analysis points to moments in the novel where femininity becomes synonymous with death: at the close of the novel his feminine side must be erased, and within the novel’s context the male dead are given the pronoun of “she”. This association effectively disappears women as subjects within the Lebanese war. In relation to surveillance culture in different historical moments – gay men during the Cold War and Muslim men post 9/11 – Meghani outlines the ways in which texts centre male figures as the target of surveillance and responses to it. It is worth noting that this textual formation elides the other targets of racist discourse: visibly Muslim women. What is consistent across the time periods is the way in which this focus on men disappears violence – both state and intimate – against minoritized women, especially queer and/or Muslim. The role of women as bastions for men is also picked up in Wesling’s article, where David’s fantasies of hetero-domesticity are relied on in order that he not feel his manhood is in question. “Woman” exists here as a figure whose presence is needed to bolster a hetero-masculinity, but whose agency is denied. Across Alkabani’s, Meghani’s and Wesling’s readings, we see masculinity emerge as sacrificing women’s agency in response to what is felt as its precarity.

In Balani’s analysis of “anxious Asian men” the gendered dynamic emerges slightly differently; women are still required to maintain the needs of their male counterparts, but here the demand emerges through Asian men being invested in sexual relationships with white women as a symbol of freedom and assimilation. The way cross-gender relationships carry the weight of colonial legacy is also gestured at in Meghani’s discussion where Changez becomes obsessive about his relationship with Erica, coded as she is as (Am)Erica. Balani further complicates the picture through addressing the way that heterosexual Asian masculinities that are modelled after coming out tropes of secrecy and disclosure; while inspired by individualist LGBT processes, these identities are not queer in any sense as they are not remotely invested in larger transformative queer politics that might seek to challenge the power structures of cross-gender and cross-race relationships. The dominance of masculinity, then, emerges and is sustained across a number of vectors, which again Wesling speaks to in emphasizing how white masculinity in particular maintains this dominance through fixing the racialized queer subject (David’s lovers Joey and Giovanni) as its other. Saeed’s observation that Shivan in The Hungry Ghosts attaches himself to his white Canadian lover Michael in order to more effectively assimilate in Canada and separate himself from his Sri Lankan heritage, then, works at the cross-section of Balani’s and Wesling’s arguments. Shivan sees whiteness as that which will offer him freedom, and through this he fixes himself as the racialized queer subject who must be denied a multiple and complex subjectivity.

The central relationship in Brand’s novel is the only sexual relationship between women that is explored in this special focus. Cummings links the desire for intimacy between women here to the heroic masculinity trope of Maroon flight, suggesting that the relationship between Verlia and Elizete rewrites and redresses dominant masculinity. As an article that offers analysis in the service of transformative queer futures, it is perhaps no surprise that in this reading same-sex relationships demonstrate a possibility for a collective queer future achieved through gender equality/gender queerness. This is located and appraised in Cummings’s reading of Brand, and its absence is noted and critiqued in Saeed’s reading of Selvadurai.

Conclusion

We think it worth noting here that the majority of our authors write as queer scholars of colour, navigating their own positions of marginality in relation to the academy. We were fortunate then, to be able to come together with authors—joined also by our fellow interlocutor, Rahul Rao—to discuss the early phases of the work for this special focus, under the auspices of a British Academy grant, “Exploring Dissident Sexuality in Postcolonial Texts”. The opportunity to discuss critical work productively with fellow travellers no doubt contributed to the solidarity and sense of purpose underpinning the special focus, and we are grateful to all participants. We would also like to thank the multidisciplinary artist and educator Jacob V. Joyce, for the cover image, taken from their graphic novel Grounder: A De-extraterrestrialisation of Alien Bodies. The articles gathered here, with their overlapping concerns and timely interventions, make what is for us a move to establish conversations around sexuality as a defined field within postcolonial literary studies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shamira A. Meghani

Shamira A. Meghani publishes on queer, postcolonial and diasporic literary and film texts, and currently teaches postcolonial and related literature in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge.

Humaira Saeed

Humaira Saeed is an educator and researcher whose work focuses on the intersections of gender, sexuality, critical race and postcolonial studies. She is the recipient of a British Academy Small Research Grant for the project “Exploring Dissident Sexuality in Postcolonial Texts”, and her monograph Persisting Partition: Affect, Memory and Trauma in Women’s Narratives of Pakistan is forthcoming.

Notes

1. It is worth highlighting that Stuart Hall’s scholarship is a connecting point for studies of sexual dissidence in the UK and postmillennial queer of colour scholarship in the US; we hope it is productive to bring these critical turns (back) together.

2. We note that the Warwick Research Collective (2015) approach to world literature poses some relevant and related challenges to postcolonial studies, but that discussions of gender and sexuality are, in the main, normatively situated.

3. While a number of postcolonial novels engage with sexual relationships between women (Manju Kapur [2002], A Married Woman; Chinelo Okparanta [2017], Under the Udala Trees), or represent gender non-conformists or transgender characters (Anosh Irani [2017], The Parcel; Shani Mootoo [1996], Cereus Blooms at Night), these are much fewer than those that engage with male relationships. It is beyond our scope here to address publishing markets and the different ways women’s/gender non-conformists’ stories get told.