Primitive Normativity: Race, Sexuality, and Temporality in Colonial Kenya

by Elizabeth W. Williams

Overview

In Primitive Normativity Elizabeth W. Williams traces the genealogy of a distinct narrative about African sexuality that British colonial authorities in Kenya used to justify their control over indigenous populations. She identifies a discourse of “primitive normativity” that suggested that Africans were too close to nature to develop sexual neuroses and practices such as hysteria, homosexuality, and prostitution which supposedly were common among Europeans. Primitive normativity framed Kenyan African sexuality as less polluted than that of the more deviant populations of their colonizers. Williams shows that colonial officials and settlers used this narrative to further the goals of white supremacy by arguing that Africans’ sexuality was proof that Kenyan Africans must be protected from the forces of urbanization, Western-style education, and political participation, lest they be exposed to forms of civilized sexual deviance. Challenging the more familiar notion that Europeans universally viewed Africans as hypersexualized, Williams demonstrates how narratives of African sexual normativity rather than deviance reinforced ideas about the evolutionary backwardness of African peoples and their inability to govern themselves.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478027621
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	12/08/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	531 KB

About the Author

Elizabeth W. Williams is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Kentucky and coeditor of The History of Sexuality: Critical Concepts in Historical Studies.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations  ix
Acknowledgments  xi
Introduction: Primitive Normativity  1
1. The Intellectual Roots of Primitive Normativity  24
2. Sleeping Dictionaries and Mobile Metropoles: Female (A)Sexuality in the Silberrad Scandal of 1908  42
3. “Stoop Low to Conquer”: Primitive Normativity and Trusteeship in the Kenyan “Indian Crisis” of 1923  69
4. White Peril: Rape, Race, and Contamination  92
5. Queering Settler Romance: The Reparative Eugenic Landscape in Nora Strange’s Kenyan Novels  117
6. Eating the Other: Erotic Consumption in Anti-Mau Mau Discourse  139
Conclusion  163
Notes  169
Bibliography  211
Index  223

Editorial Reviews

Elizabeth W. Williams brings fresh insights from queer theory and Black feminist theory to the study of settler colonialism in East Africa. Through analyzing an expansive set of textual sources, she helpfully introduces discourses of sexual normativity and deviance as key to understanding colonial processes of racial formation and ongoing politics in the region.

Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya - Lynn M. Thomas

"The book is valuable for myriad reasons including the juxtaposition of several insights that go against the grain of dominant knowledge of African sexuality, modernity, and temporality and thus offers new ways of reading that can be adapted beyond the continent. . . . Hence, the book’s utility transcends African and African diaspora studies to interlocking ways that powers seek to shape and conform their subjects through media, knowledge, or administration. In all, the author no doubt adds, extends, and offers profound insight that advances extant scholarship on race, gender, sexuality, settler colonialism, and postcolonial studies both on the continent and in the diaspora."

African Studies Review - Rosemary Oyinlola Popoola

". . . Williams has written an engaging, insightful, and generative book. It draws on a broad range of archival and print sources, engages effectively with the relevant secondary literature, and makes productively counterintuitive use of queer theory."

International Journal of African Historical Studies - Dane Kennedy

"Primitive Normativity is a groundbreaking and essential read for anyone interested in the intersections of race, sexuality, and colonialism. It accomplishes the goal of anti-colonial history, as Williams acknowledges, by allowing us to imagine new ways of being and knowing, thereby altering the continuing conditions of coloniality in the spaces we research and the spaces from which we write. This book is a powerful work that will influence and inspire future scholarship in the field. Producing a triumph of intellectual courage and witty excellence, Williams deserves her flowers for this seminal piece."

H-Africa, H-Net Reviews - Bright Alozie

"This book joins a growing number of superb queer African or African queer history studies. . . . It should be mandatory reading for scholars and students of both African history and queer theory, as well as readers interested in comparative or global histories of sexuality."

Journal of the History of Sexuality - Neville Hoad

"A book crackling with insight, wide ranging, incisive and beautifully written. For historians of colonial Kenya, this will be an essential addition to their bibliographies and reading lists. More broadly, this is a book that compels anyone interested in race and its relation to the intimate to think again about the making of difference and the reverberations of seemingly disparate bodies of knowledge through ordinary citizens’ and subjects’ lives."

Africa - Will Jackson

Primitive Normativity is a brilliant synthesis of queer theory, colonial history, and African studies. For Elizabeth W. Williams, the ‘strange settler space’ of Kenya depended upon a view of Africans as temporally backward and therefore safe from the dangers of sexually deviant, ‘over-civilized’ Europeans. Nimbly tracing discourses from the colonial archive, Williams offers an assessment of colonial sexuality and power that is as witty as it is incisive and compelling.

Queering Colonial Natal: Indigeneity and the Violence of Belonging in Southern Africa - T. J. Tallie

"Primitive Normativity is a brilliant synthesis of queer theory, colonial history, and African studies. For Elizabeth W. Williams, the 'strange settler space' of Kenya depended upon a view of Africans as temporally backward and therefore safe from the dangers of sexually deviant, 'over-civilized' Europeans. Nimbly tracing discourses from the colonial archive, Williams offers an assessment of colonial sexuality and power that is as witty as it is incisive and compelling."--T. J. Tallie, author of "Queering Colonial Natal: Indigeneity and the Violence of Belonging in Southern Africa"

"Elizabeth W. Williams brings fresh insights from queer theory and Black feminist theory to the study of settler colonialism in East Africa. Through analyzing an expansive set of textual sources, she helpfully introduces discourses of sexual normativity and deviance as key to understanding colonial processes of racial formation and ongoing politics in the region."--Lynn M. Thomas, author of "Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya"

From the Publisher