Pleasuring Pan-Africanism: A Sexual History of the Zimbabwe International Book Fair

Abstract

Pleasuring Pan-Africanism examines how the Zimbabwe International Book Fair—a preeminent destination in African literature and arts throughout the 1980s and 1990s—became a contested space that codified the limits and possibilities of sexual freedom in Zimbabwe. In 1995, President Robert Mugabe banned the Gay and Lesbian Association of Zimbabwe from participating in the event. This moment was marked as the first public claim by an African president that homosexuality was against African culture. Mugabe’s pronouncement is often treated as the defining moment of the book fair, but I argue that amid this censorship, writers staged a political and aesthetic critique of the state that centered on sexuality, or what some dreamers called erotic liberty, as a lens to reimagine national and sexual identities. My dissertation focuses on the lives and works of Dambudzo Marechera, Melissa Myambo, Yvonne Vera, and Phillip Zhuwao. To trace the genealogy of how sexuality was camouflaged and re-imagined at the book fair, I conduct close readings, oral histories, and site readings. The interdisciplinary methodology illuminates the mediating qualities of the book fair’s environment to showcase how site-specific practices expand political narratives within texts and performances. This dissertation examines how writers intervene in sexual politics, but it also argues that we see book fairs as performance spaces, as pivotal sites that mediate literary experimentation, erotic exhibition, and the production of non-normative sexual subjectivities.