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Abstract
“Our reticence [to discuss sex in public] is therefore understandable, but not acceptable when it seeps into our literature” (v) declares Sibbyl Akwaugo Whyte in her introduction to the 2018 electronic collection Erotic Africa: The Sex Anthology. Back in 2014-2015, Léonora Miano rejected the muzzling effects of racialization that until recently has led Francophone sub-Saharan and Afrodiasporic writers to suppress their sexuality. Miano’s rebellion against that repressed form of self-alienation and her striving toward poetic sexual freedom resulted in her commissioning and editing two anthologies, Première nuit: une anthologie du désir (2014) by male writers and Volcaniques: une anthologie du plaisir (2015) by female writers. Investment in correcting the silence around sex(ual) pleasure is echoed and amplified in a growing number of anthologies, mostly digital. What is the conceptual repertoire the editors, curators, and writers deploy in expressing their vision of sexual pleasure and poetic freedom? Are there discernible forms of freedom in their articulations? What kind of freedom is possible in writing and publishing erotic and/or pornographic texts in a digital space? Drawing on the collections’ editorial notes, secondary materials on the founders of the collectives and hubs, Phyllis Taoua’s reflections on freedom, and a close reading of Tuelo Gabonewe’s short story “The Oink in Doinker,” I argue that this genre and its current success is all about freedom in its instrumental and substantive guises. Specifically, I show how in combating sexual moralists through the distribution of their literary output via the Internet, these writers engage online platforms as instrumental freedoms. Using those instrumental freedoms, they practice and aspire to substantive freedoms by presenting a radical vision of sexual permissiveness, and thus remedying a stale literary scene through experimentation with content and style, which equally affords their readers a certain degree of substantive freedom. In their practices and aspiration exists the insuppressible creative resolve toward sexual self-determination that however reveals the tenuous relationship between the two kinds of freedom.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 This list is not meant to be exhaustive; for instance, it could have included Exhale: Queer African Erotic Fiction (2020) and Open: An Erotic Anthology by South African Women (2008). I have not explored them here because, unlike the other electronic anthologies that are free and freely available, Exhale is electronic but not freely available and Open was only in print and is currently out of stock.
2 In African Freedom: How Africa Responded to Independence, which began as a search for an explanation for postcolonial dispossession in Africa, Taoua explores and moves beyond widely discussed ideas of political self-determination and national sovereignty to highlight other types of freedoms. This exploration led her to build upon Amartya Sen’s seminal idea, of development as freedom, to identify four types of freedom (instrumental, substantive, existential, and meaningful) in contemporary African cultural products. Whereas “(1) instrumental freedoms pertain to tools that serve a purpose; political and civil rights and liberties such as voting, free speech, freedom of the press, the right to organize, and access to resources; (2) substantive freedoms are the ability to make choices, as in a spouse or one’s faith, and the capacity to develop one’s potential through education, work, and social opportunities in order to improve one’s quality of life” (24). As for existential freedoms, they are intangible, relating to “the spiritual realm, to ethical values, and to the psyche as in the absence of alienation” (24). The final category, meaningful freedom, the highest form, is achieved when the other three kinds work in concert, “enabling individuals to live the life they have reason to value” (89).
3 Although Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women did not publish an anthology, it is useful to include it because its origin story shares similarities with those of the platforms that published the anthologies under discussion. Additionally, a category on the hub is named “Erotica.” In 2021, Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah published The Sex Lives of African Women: Self-Discovery, Freedom and Healing, a collection of interviews conducted over six years with more than thirty black and Afro-descendant contributors from across the African continent and its global diaspora in Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean.
4 I adopt the notion of self-injury as a way to acknowledge African agency in its own misfortunes. Admission of this agency does not, however, absolve the other agents of their crimes.
5 In the dominant imagination of the West, Africa has often been associated with profligate sexuality. Figures such as Saartjie Baartman, phenomena including “overpopulation,” the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the scapegoating of non-normative sexualities, and practices such as female genital surgeries and corrective rape have contributed to crystallizing that most erroneous view.
6 Nuptial advisors who instruct newlyweds and young women in the art of lovemaking have been studied among the Lawbe of Senegal (Ly), the Nwang Abe in Nigeria (Uchendu), the Magnonmaka of Mali (Diallo), the Ssenga of Uganda (Tamale), and the Olaka in Mozambique (Arnfred). Labia elongation and kunyaza have been studied in Benin, Botswana, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. For more on the subject, see Kashamura, Tamale, Villa and Grassivaro Gallo, Arnfred, Sexuality and Gender Politics in Mozambique, Bagnol and Mariano, and Fusaschi.
7 A vibrant conversation on sexual pleasure is visible on para-intellectual sites, social media platforms, visual arts, performance work, narrative and documentary films, and literary fiction. For more on the proliferation of academic discourse and cultural production on pleasure, see Diabate’s “Nudity and Pleasure” and “On Visuals and Selling the Promise of Sexual Plaisir and Pleasure in Abidjan”.
8 Saraba magazine’s The Sex Issue features twenty writers from nine countries; Sext Me, twenty-two writers; Valentine’s Day Romance, seven authors; Dark Juices and Aphrodisiacs: Erotic Diaries, twenty writers; Emergence, twenty-six authors; Erotic Africa: The Sex Anthology, twenty-three writers; Something in the Water, fifteen authors; Première nuit: une anthologie du désir, eleven writers; and Volcaniques: une anthologie du plaisir, twelve writers. The electronic anthologies make up about one hundred and twenty-six writers. With the print collections, the number rises to about one hundred and fifty writers.
9 For Angela Carter, “Eroticism [is] the pornography of the elite” (17).
10 For more on this, see Wagner’s Eros Revived.
11 Longino’s use of The Report of The Commission on Obscenity and Pornography to operationalize pornography is debatable because the Commission does not distinguish pornography from erotica. The sentence following the one Longino quotes reads, “One presumed consequence of such portrayals is that erotica transmits an inaccurate and uninformed conception of sexuality.” For more on views against pornography, see Diana Russell’s Against Pornography and Laura Lederer’s Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography.
12 On authorial intent, see also Philip Stewart, “Définir la pornographie?” (86–98).
13 Peter Wagner explains that, in his book, “Erotica … is a comprehensive term for bawdy, obscene, erotic, and pornographic works, including scatological humour and satire, which often employ sexual elements” (5).
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Naminata Diabate
Naminata Diabate is an Associate Professor of comparative literature at Cornell University. A scholar of gender, sexuality, and race, her most recent work on literary fiction, cinema, visual arts, and digital media has appeared in a monograph, peer-reviewed journals, and collections of essays. Her book, Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa, was published by Duke University Press in 2020 and awarded the African Studies Association 2021 Best Book Award and the African Literature Association 2022 First Book Prize. This year, she holds the Ali Mazrui Senior Research Fellowship at the Africa Institute of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, working on two monographs, “Pleasure and Displeasure in Global Africa” and “Digital Insurgencies and Bodily Domains.”