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 African populations. She identifies a discourse of ""primitive normativity"" that suggested that Kenyan Africans were too close to nature to develop the forms of sexual neuroses and practices such as hysteria, homosexuality, and prostitution that were supposedly common among Europeans. Primitive normativity framed Kenyan African sexuality as less sexually polluted than that of the more deviant populations who colonized them. 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 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.

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9781478020714

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

Author Information

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.

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