Queering Colonial Natal

How were indigenous social practices deemed queer and aberrant by colonial forces? In Queering Colonial Natal, T.J. Tallie travels to colonial Natalestablished by the British in 1843, today South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal provinceto show how settler regimes “queered” indigenous practices. Defining them as threats to the normative order they sought to impose, they did so by delimiting Zulu polygamy; restricting alcohol access, clothing, and even friendship; and assigning only Europeans to government schools. Using queer and critical indigenous theory, this book critically assesses Natal (where settlers were to remain a minority) in the context of the global settler colonial project in the nineteenth century to yield a new and engaging synthesis. Tallie explores the settler colonial history of Natal’s white settlers and how they sought to establish laws and rules for both whites and Africans based on European mores of sexuality and gender. At the same time, colonial archives reveal that many African and Indian people challenged such civilizational claims. Ultimately Tallie argues that the violent collisions between Africans, Indians, and Europeans in Natal shaped the conceptions of race and gender that bolstered each group’s claim to authority.

The first English translation of the field-defining work in Brazilian studies ethnohistory by the late John M. Monteiro.

Tapping into the political power of magic and astrology for social, community, and personal transformation. In a cross-cultural approach to understanding astrology as a magical language, Alice Sparkly Kat unmasks the political power of astrology, showing how it can be channeled as a force for collective healing and liberation. Too often, magic and astrology are divorced from their potency and cultural contexts: co-opted by neoliberalism, used as a force of oppression, or distilled beyond recognition into applications that belie their individual and collective power. By looking at the symbolic and etymological histories of the sun, moon, Saturn, Venus, Mercury, Mars, and Jupiter, we can trace and understand the politics of magic--and challenge our own practices, interrogate our truths, and reshape our institutions to build better frameworks for communities of care. Fearless, radical, and fresh, Sparkly Kat's Postcolonial Astrology ushers in a new wave of astrology revival, refusing to apologize for its magickism and connecting its power to the spirituality and politics we need now. Intersectional, inclusive, and geared towards queer and POC communities, it uses our historical and collective constructs of the planets, sun, and moon to re-chart our subconscious history, redefine the body in the world, and assert our politics of the personal, in astrology and all things.

Intimacies of friendship create vital spaces for practices of power and resistance within the histories of apartheid and colonialism. What does friendship have to do with racial difference, settler colonialism and post-apartheid South Africa? While histories of apartheid and colonialism in South Africa have often focused on the ideologies of segregation and white supremacy, Ties that Bind explores how the intimacies of friendship create vital spaces for practices of power and resistance. Combining interviews, history, poetry, visual arts, memoir and academic essay, the collection keeps alive the promise of friendship and its possibilities while investigating how affective relations are essential to the social reproduction of power. From the intimacy of personal relationships to the organising ideology of liberal colonial governance, the contributors explore the intersection of race and friendship from a kaleidoscope of viewpoints and scales. Insisting on a timeline that originates in settler colonialism, Ties that Bind uncovers the implication of anti-blackness within nonracialism, and powerfully challenges a simple reading of the Mandela moment and the rainbow nation. In the wake of countrywide student protests calling for decolonisation of the university, and reignited debates around racial inequality, this timely volume insists that the history of South African politics has always already been about friendship. Written in an accessible and engaging style, Ties that Bind will interest a wide audience of scholars, students and activists, as well as general readers curious about contemporary South African debates around race and intimacy.

A detailed history explaining how and why, in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, Africans from the British colony of Natal transformed their ethnic self-identification, constructing and claiming a new Zulu identity.

DIVHow the Xavante Indians have reshaped the Brazilian government’s policies of nationalism and assimiliation./div

As lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex identities increasingly secure legal recognition across the globe, these formal equality gains are contradicted by the continued presence of violence. Such violence emerges as a political pressure point for contestations of identity and power within wider systems of global and local inequality. Discourses of homophobia-related violence constitute subjectivities that enact violence and that are rendered vulnerable to it, as well as shaping political possibilities to act against violence. Blackwashing Homophobia critiques prevailing discourses through which violence and its queer targets are normatively understood, exploring the knowledge regimes in which multiple forms of othering are both reproduced and/or resisted. This book draws on primary research on lesbian subjectivity and violence in South Africa examining the intersections of sexual, gender, race and class identities, and the contemporary politics of violence in a postcolonial context: • What are the contending ways of knowing queers and the violence they face? • How are the causes, characters, consequence of, and ‘cures’ for, violence constructed through such knowledges and what are their power effects? The book explores these questions and their implications for how violence, as an instrument of power, might be countered. Blackwashing Homophobia is a timely intervention for theorising the discourse of homophobia-related violence and what it reveals and conceals, enables and hinders, in relation to queer identities and political imaginaries in times of violence. The book’s interdisciplinary approach to the topic will appeal to social and political scientists, philosophers and psychology professionals, as well as to advanced psychology undergraduates and postgraduates alike.

Challenging the stereotypes of African heterosexuality - from the precolonial era to the present.