Wasafiri 50: Queer Postcolonial

'What does it mean to be postcolonially queer, or/and queerly postcolonial? Are diaspora and transnational identities inevitably queer in their border-crossings, their lability, their destabilising mobility, and multiplicity? If this is the case, why has "queer" seemed marginal to postcolonial discourse until quite recently?'

Guest editor Sara Salih was first inspired to create this special Queer Postcolonial issue at a time when LGBTQ+ communities were confronting violent anti-gay content in Jamaican dancehall music. In the resulting issue – across poetry, fiction, academic articles, interviews, and reviews – contributors from around the world, such as Linton Kwesi Johnson, Maggie Gee, Jarrod Hayes, Maureen Duffy, and more, take a stridently intersectional approach to their work, mapping colonial legacies in representations of queerness, while challenging ideas that 'treat class, race, gender, and sexuality as discrete, separable entities.' 

Editorial

‘Our people know the difference, black is a race, jew is a religion, f*g**tism is a sin’: Towards a Queer Postcolonial Hermeneutics
Sara Salih

Articles

Circumcising Zionism, Queering Diaspora: Reviving Albert Memmi’s Penis
Jarrod Hayes

Hide and Seek with Rebels: Tracing Contemporary Queer Art in Cracks and Rips
Caroline Smith

‘If You Like Professor, I Will Come Home With You’: Advocating a Queer Reading of Wole Soyinka’s The Road
Chris Dunton

Obituary: Louise Bennett, Voice of a People
Linton Kwesi Johnson

Interviews

‘Bringing the Head and the Body Together’: Valerie Mason-John and Dorothea Smartt in conversation
Maggie Gee

Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai in conversation
Gautam Bhan

Prose

An Extract: Illuminations
Maureen Duffy

Miri ya Mikongoe
Keguro Macharia

Blue Women
Gillian Hanscombe

Poetry

Fables
Suniti Namjoshi

The Lurex Years | The Legislator's View
Christopher Barnes

Memory of Fingertips
Ian Iqbal Rashid

Facing the Double Bed, Single
Jackie Kay

revolushun lll | letter to tchaiko
d’bi young

Sycorax
Luke Reid

Like cold air passing through lips | My Conqueror | Sea patois
Saradha Soobrayen

Reviews

Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation - Elleke Boehmer 
Denise deCaires Narain

Because I Have a Voice: Queer Politics in India - Arvind Narrain and Gautam Bhan, ed
Kanika Batra

Swimming in the Monsoon Sea - Shyam Selvadurai 
Story-Wallah: Short Fiction from South Asian Writers - Multiple writers
Andrew Lesk

Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East - Brian Whitaker
Drew Shaw

Weight Loss - Upamanya Chatterjee
Bruce King

Hotbeds: Black-White Love in Novels from the United States, Africa and the Caribbean - Pia Thielmann
Gender and Identity in the Works of Osonye Tess Onwueme - Francoise Ugochukwu Iniobong I Uko
Sabine Broeck

Art of the Caribbean: Selection of Postcards and Texts - Anne Walmsley
Annie Paul

A Meeting of Continents: The International Book Fair of Radical black and Third World Books - Sarah White et al, ed
Bill Schwarz

Brown Eyes: A Selection of Creative Expression by Black and Mixed Race Women - Nicole Moore, ed
Leila Kamali

LKJ Live in Paris with the Dennis Bovell Dub Band, CD
Susanne Muhleisen