Chantal Zabus – författare

This collection by trans and non-trans academics and artists from the United States, the UK, and continental Europe, examines how transgenderism can be conceptualized in a literary, biographical, and autobiographical framework, with emphasis on place, ethnicity and visibility. The volume covers the 1950s to the present day and examines autobiographical accounts and films featuring gender transition. Chapters focus on various stages of transitioning. Interviews with trans people are also provided.

The Future of Postcolonial Studies celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of The Empire Writes Back by the now famous troika - Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. When The Empire Writes Back first appeared in 1989, it put postcolonial cultures and their post-invasion narratives on the map. This vibrant collection of fifteen chapters by both established and emerging scholars taps into this early mapping while merging these concerns with present trends which have been grouped as: comparing, converting, greening, post-queering and utopia. The postcolonial is a centrifugal force that continues to energize globalization, transnational, diaspora, area and queer studies. Spanning the colonial period from the 1860s to the present, The Future of Postcolonial Studies ventures into other postcolonies outside of the Anglophone purview. In reassessing the nation-state, language, race, religion, sexuality, the environment, and the very idea of 'the future,' this volume reasserts the notion that postcolonial is an "anticipatory discourse" and bears testimony to the driving energy and thus the future of postcolonial studies.

This book articles presents new scholarship on the subject of imperial expansion through colonization and globalization from a variety of postcolonial perspectives. The essays in this volume, grouped in three chapters, scrutinize imperial expansion within the context of national identities and imageries-deconstructing the modernist and utopian idea of a nation as a site of homogeneity, and reviewing the importance of the concept in the different phases of colonization. Hence the first chapter is entitled 'Neo-Imperial Traces or Premonitions in Modernism.' The post-classical phase of colonialism is examined through the representation of the colonized and the once-colonized. Applying postcolonial theories and often moving beyond them, scholars scrutinize such textual and filmic representations as exemplified in Asia. These make up Chapter Two, 'Interference of the Imperial Tradition in Asia,' which allows for the re-articulations of cultural heritage in the region within the different and ever renewed schemes of imperial expansion. Chapter Three, 'Reformulations of the Imperial Project,' seeks to explore the questions surrounding inclusion in and exclusion from the realm of power as the founding principle of empire, suggesting that they are discursive and deliberate. Postcolonial societies inherit the trauma of colonialism that subjected people to a cultural displacement that is exacerbated by renewed efforts of imperial influence through globalization.

In the past five decades and over three generations, African women writers have introduced a new autobiographical discourse around their experience of excision that brings nuance to the Female Genital Mutilation debate. Spanning pharaonic times through classical antiquity to the onset of the twenty-first century, this unprecedented study shows how this experiential body of literature—encompassing English, Arabic, and French—goes far beyond such traditional topics as universalism and cultural relativism, by locating the female body as a site of liminality between European and African factions, subject and agent; consent and dissent; custom and human rights. Women across the African "excision belt" have broken away from the male discourses of anthropology and psychoanalysis and have fled from "the cult of culture" and from religious and patriarchal surveillance. These women have relocated their struggle to the West, where they seek empowerment and wrestle with the law. While showing the limits of autobiography, Between Rites and Rights boldly interweaves Freudian hysteria, the surgical age, the world of high fashion, male circumcision's "fearful symmetry," and Western body modification.

The Future of Postcolonial Studies celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of The Empire Writes Back by the now famous troika - Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. When The Empire Writes Back first appeared in 1989, it put postcolonial cultures and their post-invasion narratives on the map. This vibrant collection of fifteen chapters by both established and emerging scholars taps into this early mapping while merging these concerns with present trends which have been grouped as: comparing, converting, greening, post-queering and utopia. The postcolonial is a centrifugal force that continues to energize globalization, transnational, diaspora, area and queer studies. Spanning the colonial period from the 1860s to the present, The Future of Postcolonial Studies ventures into other postcolonies outside of the Anglophone purview. In reassessing the nation-state, language, race, religion, sexuality, the environment, and the very idea of 'the future,' this volume reasserts the notion that postcolonial is an "anticipatory discourse" and bears testimony to the driving energy and thus the future of postcolonial studies.

This collection by trans and non-trans academics and artists from the United States, the UK, and continental Europe, examines how transgenderism can be conceptualized in a literary, biographical, and autobiographical framework, with emphasis on place, ethnicity and visibility. The volume covers the 1950s to the present day and examines autobiographical accounts and films featuring gender transition. Chapters focus on various stages of transitioning. Interviews with trans people are also provided.

Transafrica explores this new lexical culture in cultural materials (novels, poetry, testimonies/life stories, interviews, film, visual art) in English, French, Arabic and other selected African languages, and the meanings which Africans have transnationally conferred upon “queer” and “transgender"—from North to South. Gender nonconformity and sexual dissidence on the African continent has produced a lexical culture at the crossroads of Western discourse and local African naming practices. Transafrica is an unprecedented attempt at identifying the new vocabularies which queer and transgender Africans have used in the first two decades of the 21st century to refer to themselves and narrativize their desire, in the face of official narratives by medical doctors, and legal and religious authorities that have often been prioritized over a gender-variant (queer, trans, non-binary) individual’s lived experience, resulting in a systemic disempowerment.Using case studies from Morocco, Egypt, Somalia, Nigeria, Uganda, Madagascar, Botswana, South Africa and more, Transafrica draws conclusions for a culture-specific and history-specific type of gender diversity outside of Western epistemic borders while confronting Euro-American models, thereby auguring a turn-of-the-third-millennium postqueer set of African open-ended identities.

Transafrica explores this new lexical culture in cultural materials (novels, poetry, testimonies/life stories, interviews, film, visual art) in English, French, Arabic and other selected African languages, and the meanings which Africans have transnationally conferred upon “queer” and “transgender"—from North to South. Gender nonconformity and sexual dissidence on the African continent has produced a lexical culture at the crossroads of Western discourse and local African naming practices. Transafrica is an unprecedented attempt at identifying the new vocabularies which queer and transgender Africans have used in the first two decades of the 21st century to refer to themselves and narrativize their desire, in the face of official narratives by medical doctors, and legal and religious authorities that have often been prioritized over a gender-variant (queer, trans, non-binary) individual’s lived experience, resulting in a systemic disempowerment.Using case studies from Morocco, Egypt, Somalia, Nigeria, Uganda, Madagascar, Botswana, South Africa and more, Transafrica draws conclusions for a culture-specific and history-specific type of gender diversity outside of Western epistemic borders while confronting Euro-American models, thereby auguring a turn-of-the-third-millennium postqueer set of African open-ended identities.

Homophobia is still rife and it remains dangerous and even life-threatening to be out in Africa, but Chantal Zabus here traces the range of representations of same-sex desire in Africa through historic and contemporary sources.Homosexuality was and still is thought to be quintessentially 'un-African'. Yet in this book Chantal Zabus examines the anthropological, cultural and literary representations of male and female same-sex desire in a pan-African context from the nineteenth century to the present. Reaching back to early colonial contacts between Europe and Africa, and covering a broad geographical spectrum, along a north-south axis from Mali to South Africa and an east-west axis from Senegal to Kenya, here is a comparative approach encompassing two colonial languages (English and French) and some African languages.Out in Africa charts developments in Sub-Saharan African texts and contextsthrough the work of 7 colonial writers and some 25 postcolonial writers. These texts grow in complexity from roughly the 1860s, through the 1990s with the advent of queer theory, up to 2010. The author identifies those texts thatpresent, in a subterraneous way at first and then with increased confidence, homosexuality-as-an-identity rather than an occasional or ritualized practice, as was the case in the early ethnographic imagination. The work sketchesout an evolutionary pattern in representing male and female same-sex desire in the novel and other texts, as well as in the cultural and political contexts that oppose such desires.

Chantal Zabus develops the notion of 'post-identity' and documents the gradual dissolution of the traditional pillars of identity formation through readings of postcolonial, Indigenous and diasporic literature.Literatures without Identity argues that the four bastions of identity formation have been ousted by enhanced ‘relationalities’ in postcolonial, Indigenous and diasporic literature at the beginning of the 21st century. In this new world of culture, writers have denounced the fixed and impermeable: The mother tongue and the monolingual paradigm in favor of the post-monolingual. The notion of ‘race’ extended to speciesism has been transplanted by post-racial and interspecies identities. The binding ‘religion’ of an individual has become the transnational. And the male/female binary has given way to preferred gendered identities. Encompassing a wide range of global literature from North America and Africa to Australasia, Chantal Zabus demonstrates how contemporary writers have opted for interconnected histories and mobilities, extended selves, interspecies ‘kinnings’ and the porosity of state borders through refugeeism and other divergent crossings. Literatures without Identity provokes imaginative leaps and conversations across cultures around the shifts in identity formation in the late 20th and early 21st centuries while grounding itself in analog cultural productions as well as digital, anthropological and philosophical texts. It anticipates the advent of the ‘late’ Anthropocene and a future beyond racial classification, human exceptionalism and mass destruction.