A Pan-African Exploration of Queer Embodiment in African Film: A Book Review of Gibson Ncube’s Queer Bodies in African Films (NISC, December 2022)

Abstract

Gibson Ncube’s monograph produces a Pan-African archive of films that grapple with the specificities of queer embodiment in several regions on the African continent. Queer Bodies in African Films does important intra-continental theorising about what it means to be queer in Africa, or African and queer, in both North and sub-Saharan African contexts, with a corpus that maps filmed queer bodies
in selected Maghrebian (chapter one), Egyptian (chapter two), East African (chapter three), and South African films (chapter four). Throughout, Ncube centres the filmed queer body as a site where “multiple and often intersecting discourses and narratives” (Ncube 2022, p.2) contest for legitimacy within their given cultural milieus. In this frame, the author remains attentive to “how the touching of bodies and rubbing together of physical bodies produce feelings and affection and forge (dis)connections” (2). As Ncube avers, this kind of pan-African consideration of queerness is lacking in Queer African Studies, and the monograph provides a useful entry point for scholars looking to do similar intracontinental research.