14:00 - 15:30
Room: Poynting – Lecture Theatre S06
Stream: The Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies stream
Queer Nairobi, Everyday Queers
Eddie Ombagi
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Braamfontein

Queer African Studies has always implicated itself within a historicized geography and tradition. This paper seeks to time-travel after time and locates specific queer practices, artifacts and soundtracks located in the everyday present – specifically the Nairobi present. Here, I ask how these everyday practices, already lodged in various and sometimes multiple customary archives, are produced, circulated and consumed within an active, dynamic and precarious Nairobi Urban. For Queer Nairobi, then, I ask what sorts of imaginative forms of being and ways of knowing are harnessed within and among themselves when these encounters are performed using specific queer rubrics but also enacted in spaces that emerge from specific customary genealogies. Significantly, the article will reveal how these everyday practices by Queer Nairobi generates a framework that necessarily blurs the historicized geography of Queer African Studies and locates it within a productive time-loop of the ‘ever-present’ or ‘ever-now’.


Reference:
Tu-A43 Eastern Africa 1-P-001
Presenter/s:
Eddie Ombagi
Presentation type:
Panel
Room:
Poynting – Lecture Theatre S06
Date:
Tuesday, 11 September
Time:
14:00 - 14:15
Session times:
14:00 - 15:30