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The recent surge in scholarship on queer African visuality has brought into sharp focus the queer somapolitics of body-technics-visualitytechnology assemblages. In this frame, queer visuality can be understood as a new presentfuture philosophical and ethico-political horizon which views the body, visuality and technology as coimbricated and mutually interdependent in contemporary society.

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Furthermore, as Mel Y. Chen (2016, 237) argues, ‘temporality scholarship has established [that] time plays out multiply and unsteadily’, thus disrupting notions that pre-coloniality, coloniality and decoloniality are discreet. Such views, at any rate, blind us to the many and varied material-cultural entanglements spread across multiple temporal rhythms. A queer visuality, on the other hand, calls for richer, more complex understandings of temporality and subjectivity that refuse linear, flat explanations.

How, then, are we to think about corporeality, queer visuality and technology without negating the problematics of the (colonial) gaze and spectatorial politics? Furthermore, what happens when historically excluded bodies enter visuality? What kinds of analyses are needed to disrupt linear and Eurocentric and able-ist conceptions of visualised modernity? What are the power operations on/with/through bodies, visuality and technologies and how do these converge, align or negate the body politic? In essence, what happens when ‘queer’, ‘visuality’, and ‘African’ enter the same sentence?

We invite 350-word proposals for papers or panel discussions on the relation between body, visuality, and technology outlined above. Possible avenues to explore include, but are not limited to, Black Panther, The Wound/Inxeba, Kwezi, Bittercomix, Wanuri Kahiu, Dean Hutton, Athi-Patra Ruga, Zanele Muholi, Nicholas Hlobo, Lauren Beukes, Tiger Maremela, and Banele Khoza.

We also encourage theoretical considerations of African queer theory. Proposals can be sent to Chantelle Gray van Heerden and Wemar Strydom at februarylectures@gmail.com by 31 September 2018.

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Conference details

Deadline for proposals: 30 September 2018

Wemar Strydom : februarylectures@gmail.com
Chantelle Gray van Heerden: februarylectures@gmail.com

Date: 28 February and 01 March 2019
Venue : NWU Potchefstroom campus

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