Notes on the Nation: A Conversation with Sara Ahmed’s Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality, The Cultural Politics of Emotion and Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others

abstract

In this special issue of Agenda which calls for an engagement on the question of xenophobia, national belonging and the techniques of difference within the context of South Africa, I position and locate these discourses with and through a reading of the works of Sara Ahmed.

Sara Ahmed is a renowned scholar working in the intersections of feminist theory, queer theory, critical race theory and postcolonial theory. Ahmed has authored several books that include Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism (1998); Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (2000); The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004); Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006); The Promise of Happiness (2010); On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012) and Willful Subjects (2014). These works straddle several concerns that lie beside and with many of the questions that this special issue aims to grapple with.

In this review essay I specifically read Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality, The Cultural Politics of Emotion and Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. This review offers an interaction between myself and the work of Sara Ahmed through the various figurations of the stranger, foreigner, other and queer.

keywords:

• xenophobia
• national belonging
• difference
• stranger
• other
• queer

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eddie Ombagi

EDDIE OMBAGI is a PhD candidate at the Department of African Literature at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. His research can be located at the intersection of gender, queer and literary studies, with a focus on imagining a different epistemological framework with which to articulate queer studies and politics in Africa.