This ground-breaking volume provides scholars with a sustained exploration of human sexuality as an integral part of gender studies. The book’s theoretical, interpretative, and analytical approaches document the state of present knowledge on homoeroticism in African literature and film.

The editors and eminent contributing scholars to this volume—Ada Uzoamaka Azodo, Maureen Ngozi Eke, Christiane P. Makward, Miriam C. Gyimah, Keith M. Harris, and Chukwuma Okoye—draw attention to the paucity of homosexuality as an abiding theme in African creative and artistic activities, emphasizing the need to separate sex from gender, investigate the correlation between gender and sex as categories of human identities, and between gender and creative artistic practices. They look at characterization, textual and filmic structure and plot in terms of identification, and this not always traditionally.

The contributors raise major questions and also provide background information on the prevailing views on gender and sexuality, differences of viewpoint between literature and film, men and women, males and females, the evolution of human sexuality throughout African history, and what genre and race have got to do with it.

This book, therefore, urges the reader to explore how literature and film interact with political, economic, and social life in Africa, and to challenge cultural biases that predominate about Africa and its diaspora the world over.

ABOUT THE EDITORS
ADA UZOAMAKA AZODO, Diplômée en Études Supérieures de Français (DES), Université de Dakar, B. A. (Honors), University of Ife, M. A. and Ph. D., University of Lagos, is associate faculty in African Diaspora and African American Studies, and Women’s Studies, at Indiana University Northwest at Gary, and has written five books, six scholarly articles in refereed journals, and fifteen book chapters on Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta, Ama Ata Aidoo, Mariama Bâ, and Chinua Achebe.

MAUREEN NGOZI EKE, B. A. (Special Honors, English), Ahmadu Bello University, M. A. and Ph. D. (Comparative Literature), Indiana University, is professor of English at Central Michigan University and has published three books, seventeen scholarly articles in refereed journals, two book chapters in critical and scholarly anthologies, three non-academic publications in magazines, and has scripted and/or produced three videos and CDs.

CATEGORY
Gender Studies, Literary Criticism, Film Studies/AFRICA