Anarcho-Ecstasy: Options for an Afri-Queer Becoming | e-flux Journal

This long-form essay, published in e-flux Journal #139, moves between political-economic, art historical, and philosophical registers of analysis to grapple with the historical and contemporary condition of queerness in continental African politics, and by extension, the mutual entwinement of the struggles for decolonial liberation and queer liberation. Taking the increasing anti-queer legislation passed by African governments within the last decade as a point of departure, the essay considers the counterstrategies of queer African activists and scholars, identifying their strengths and pitfalls; foregrounds and unsettles the coloniality of gender and sexuality through a metaphysical decipherment of the work of queer British-Nigerian photographer, Rotimi Fani-Kayode; and proposes, through an unstable interweaving of the queer erotic and African philosophical conceptions of personhood, an anarchic decolonial alternative to Enlightenment notions of individuated subjectivity and nation-state sovereignty.

The essay is a theoretical complement to the curatorial project, Traces of Ecstasy, which was developed concurrently for the fourth edition of the Lagos Biennial and at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University in February 2024.

Image: Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Bronze Head, 1987.