Afro-pessimistic literature in combination with queer theory highlights the normativizing effects of homonationalism and advocating for a radical rethinking of queerness. Only the intersection of these fields of study can envision spaces for queer existence and community outside hegemonic social norms.

In particular, I am interested in how this archive of African queer literature appeal to this time relation made possible by “queer” to reanimate debates that have been side-lined, if not displaced, by an overly pragmatic turn in queer theory, which ‘has dominated sexuality studies’ since ‘the post-civil rights era’ in the Global North (Puar xiv). There has been a trend in queer theory, initiated by Jasbir Puar’s work on homonationalism, critiquing this political turn in queer theory. Puar sums up this pragmatism as ‘a fatigued debate about the advances and merits of civil legitimation – legalization of sodomy, gay marriage, and gay adoption’ (Ibid xiv). In her critique, Puar argues that, in fact, ‘homosexual desires’ and their reorientation towards these forms of queerness that are acceptable to the nation – monogamous family units endorsed by marriage, for example – ‘are foundational to the project of nationalism, as is the strict policing of the homo-hetero binary’ (Ibid 49). Thus, she argues, ‘nations are heteronormative because of, rather than despite, homosexuality’ (Ibid). To put it succinctly, homonationalism, the folding into the nation of certain forms of queer identity, is therefore a normative project. Queerness, in this sense ‘operates as a regulatory script not only of normative gayness, queerness, or homosexuality, but also of the racial and national norms that reinforce these sexual subjects’ (Ibid 2). This folding-into-the nation of queer subjects, however, should be understood as ‘a biopolitical project’ and hence a normalising into nationhood that produces a set of discriminations (Ibid 22). For Puar, the ‘emergence and sanctioning of queer subjecthood is a historical shift condoned only through a parallel process of demarcation from populations targeted for segregation, disposal, or death, a reintensification of racialization through queerness’ (Ibid xii). Indeed, she argues that ‘[h]omonormativity can be read as a formation complicit with and invited into the biopolitical valorization of life in its inhabitation and reproduction of heteronormative norms’ (Ibid 9). This counterstrand of queer theory has led me to consider how these Moroccan and South African novels and their focus on the ethics of group sex, and the meaning of democratic sexual citizenship, can be productive WI SH WE WE RE QUE E R 10 for exactly the kinds of alternative projects proposed by theorists like Puar, which will move us beyond homonormative pragmatism. Muñoz suggests that one way to overcome the stifling pragmatism of contemporary queer politics, and perhaps we can add postcolonial politics too, is to take a ‘posterior glance at different moments, objects, and spaces [that] might offer us an anticipatory illumination of queerness’ (Ibid). In doing so, in stepping back to look forward, and in imagining future queer utopias, the texts I have chosen illuminate an alternative to the pragmatic preoccupation with the political present that dominates much contemporary African scholarship on sexuality as well. This search for queer utopias – each of which are individual rather than monolithic – also disorientates the impulse to calcify diverse African sexualities in historically contingent categories of identity, advocating instead for forms of being/becoming that resist neat categorisation. These particular African texts articulate the possibility of stepping outside of the normative, of bending and twisting time, in such ways as to produce entirely novel ways of conceiving of normative conventions and categories – of gender, sexuality and especially temporality – effectively queering the schemes of intelligibility that construct temporality while creating new spaces for queer existence, or queer utopias. In this way, queer figures in African literatures speak back to queer and postcolonial theory, developing and extending its theorising of time and politics. One of the ways that these texts formulate new ways to think about time is in their investment in moments of group and/or public sex, which I argue constitutes a mode of undercommons belonging. In The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013), Moten and Harney unravel the idea of the undercommons as an organic collectivity at the margins of academia, although it is a notion that can be extended and applied to all who occupy the margins of society more broadly. ‘Undercommons’ as a critical term describes the radical and utopian possibility of community formations outside of social norms; it is the potential for alliances amongst outsiders of various stripes. As Halberstam describes in the introduction to their book, the undercommons can be ‘black people, indigenous peoples, queers and poor people (“Wild Beyond” 6). It includes those who ‘cannot be satisfied with the recognition and acknowledgement generated by the very system that denies a) that anything was ever broken and b) that we deserved to be the broken part’ (Ibid). The undercommons is thus a ‘call to dis-order and this disorder or wildness shows up in many places’ (Ibid 7). Hence, the undercommons articulates a certain desire ‘to take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the places that we know lie outside its walls’ (Ibid 6). Inherent in the desire to ‘rely on the undercommons for protection’, Moten and Harney argue, is a kind of ‘fugitive impulse’ (40). The undercommons itself can thus be thought of as a ‘fugitive community’ (Ibid) that for Halberstam is ‘mostly about reaching out to find connection; they are about making common cause with the brokenness of being’ (“Wild Beyond” 5). This notion of the undercommons aligns well with the intention of queer theory and activism, and certain forms of feminism, that attempt to ‘dismantle’ the binarisms of heteropatriarchy, to ‘take apart’ the ways that heteronormativity structure our lives and living. Thus, queer theory can be one of the “wild places” where the undercommons shows up. Moten and Harney are also insistent that, rather than define the undercommons as belonging to the university 11 INTRODUCTION alone, ‘the concepts are ways to develop a mode of living together, a mode of being together that cannot be shared as a model but as an instance’ (105). For Moten and Harney, therefore, it is more important that the concept be ‘put in play’ in different circumstances and for different ideas and outcomes (Ibid 106).