Keguro Macharia
Biographic Data
| ID | 3672481 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Keguro Macharia |
| GIVEN NAMES | Keguro |
| FAMILY NAME | Macharia |
| SIGNATURE | MACHARIA K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Film Independent |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 89 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
After Exorcism
Thank you to Gibson Ncube, Naminata Diabate, T.J. Tallie, Xavier Livermon, Hugo ka Canham, and Z’étoile Imma for accepting the invitation to think with me. Invitations are fraught things: you never
Dear Hugo
You don’t have revolution without sound’
A Questionnaire on Diaspora and the Modern
The twentieth century was deeply grooved with the trodden pathways of mass migrations. These journeys were propelled by violence and historical cataclysm: pogroms and genocides; natural and unnatural famines and disasters; land dispossession, regimes of apartheid and forced labor; revolution, war, and occupation; colonization and decolonization; and the realignments that followed in their wake. The pioneering sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois may have…
Invitation
Subversion has been the dominant orientation in queer studies, not invitation. We are to refuse and resist and destroy and fuck it all up. The we-ness of this we emerges through this shared resistance to normativity and its promises and lies. Occasionally, we are permitted tenderness, but it is often so fleeting as to be insignificant. Occasionally, we are permitted vulnerability, but we know the dangers of being vulnerable, so we sharpen our wit…
With Gratitude, Toward Freedom
Frottage
“Frottage” elaborates a conceptual framework for the book. It describes how black diasporic geohistories reframe queer studies and how queer studies, in turn, reframe black diaspora studies. I identify three key terms in black diaspora studies: kinship, hybridity, and thinghood. Dominant approaches in black diaspora studies have framed the black diaspora as a search for kinship, whether biological or fictive, creating what I describe as a genealo…
The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies
This chapter examines queer digital culture, a term that refers to the ways in which LGBTQ+ identities, practices, and theories have been mixed up in the emergence, design, and constitution of digital technology. It highlights significant shifts at the intersections of queer identity and politics and digital communication technologies from the 1980s to the early twenty-first century, including transitions from textual to audiovisual media; from s…
Afterword
Afterword: Across Difference, Toward Freedom Keguro Macharia (bio) Invitation I was delighted when SA Smythe invited me to write this Afterword. It extended an earlier invitation issued in 2018 to participate in a symposium, “Troubling the Grounds: Global Figurations of Blackness, Nativism, and Indigeneity,” held in May 2019. My response to Dr. Smythe was short: “My mother has cancer—not a secret—and I’m her primary caregiver. I’m unable to trave…
Belated
The article "belated : interruption" stages an encounter between queer and Africa
Frottage
Winner, 2020 Alan Bray Memorial Prize, given by the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association A new understanding of freedom in the black diaspora grounded in the erotic In Frottage , Keguro Macharia weaves together histories and theories of blackness and sexuality to generate a fundamentally new understanding of both the black diaspora and queer studies. Macharia maintains that to reach this understanding, we must start from the black diasp…
Reflections on Trans* & Taxonomy (with Neo Musangi)
This reflection juxtaposes African queer studies and visual studies to consider how African queerness is represented. Taking the work of Kenyan photographer Neo Musangi as its point of departure, it foregrounds questions raised by representations of trans individuals about the politics of knowledge and the ethics of opacity. As trans activists and intellectuals have noted, the visual is an especially vexed site of gendered policing, and I conside…
On Being Area-Studied
Research Article| April 01 2016 On Being Area-Studied: A Litany of Complaint Keguro Macharia Keguro Macharia Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2016) 22 (2): 183–189. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-3428711 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Keguro Macharia; On Being Area-Studied: A Litany of Complaint. GLQ 1 April 2016; 22 (2): 183–189. doi: https://doi.o…
Archive and method in Queer African Studies
This writing considers the relationship between archive-production and archive-use and method in Queer African Studies. It turns to three sites. First, it examines an early document from Kenya's archives to examine what official archives can see and know, and how they might be used. Second, it draws attention to the often-overlooked archive of 1960s African liberation narratives that address and enflesh the figure of the homosexual within decolon…
Love
Jambo Bwana
Queering Helga Crane
Drawing from George Hutchinson’s recent revisionist biography of Nella Larsen and scholarship in the fields of immigration and queer studies, this article advances a new interpretation of Quicksand as a text that critiques racial and sexual normativity. I argue that Larsen identifies and critiques a distinct black nativism that, in the early decades of the twentieth century, sutured racial and sexual normativity, producing figures like Larsen as …
Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley. Thiefing Sugar
On the Margins
Reviewed by: On the Margins: Race, Gender, and Empire, and: Africa Writes Back to Self: Metafiction, Gender, Sexuality Keguro Macharia On the Margins: Race, Gender, and Empire By O. R. Dathorne Trenton. NJ: Africa World P, 2009. xvii + 269 pp. ISBN 159221-650-X paper. Africa Writes Back to Self: Metafiction, Gender, Sexuality By Evan Maina Mwangi Albany: SUNY P, 2009. xiv + 346 pp. ISBN 978-1-4384-2681-5 cloth. O. R. Dathorne’s study provides an …
Slicing the Hunger
Miri ya Mikongoei 1
On Being Area-Studied
Research Article| April 01 2016 On Being Area-Studied: A Litany of Complaint Keguro Macharia Keguro Macharia Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2016) 22 (2): 183–189. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-3428711 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Keguro Macharia; On Being Area-Studied: A Litany of Complaint. GLQ 1 April 2016; 22 (2): 183–189. doi: https://doi.o…
Archive and method in Queer African Studies
This writing considers the relationship between archive-production and archive-use and method in Queer African Studies. It turns to three sites. First, it examines an early document from Kenya's archives to examine what official archives can see and know, and how they might be used. Second, it draws attention to the often-overlooked archive of 1960s African liberation narratives that address and enflesh the figure of the homosexual within decolon…
Belated
The article "belated : interruption" stages an encounter between queer and Africa
Love
Jambo Bwana
Reflections on Trans* & Taxonomy (with Neo Musangi)
This reflection juxtaposes African queer studies and visual studies to consider how African queerness is represented. Taking the work of Kenyan photographer Neo Musangi as its point of departure, it foregrounds questions raised by representations of trans individuals about the politics of knowledge and the ethics of opacity. As trans activists and intellectuals have noted, the visual is an especially vexed site of gendered policing, and I conside…
Slicing the Hunger
Miri ya Mikongoei 1
Slicing the Hunger
Queering Helga Crane
Drawing from George Hutchinson’s recent revisionist biography of Nella Larsen and scholarship in the fields of immigration and queer studies, this article advances a new interpretation of Quicksand as a text that critiques racial and sexual normativity. I argue that Larsen identifies and critiques a distinct black nativism that, in the early decades of the twentieth century, sutured racial and sexual normativity, producing figures like Larsen as …
Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley. Thiefing Sugar
On the Margins
Reviewed by: On the Margins: Race, Gender, and Empire, and: Africa Writes Back to Self: Metafiction, Gender, Sexuality Keguro Macharia On the Margins: Race, Gender, and Empire By O. R. Dathorne Trenton. NJ: Africa World P, 2009. xvii + 269 pp. ISBN 159221-650-X paper. Africa Writes Back to Self: Metafiction, Gender, Sexuality By Evan Maina Mwangi Albany: SUNY P, 2009. xiv + 346 pp. ISBN 978-1-4384-2681-5 cloth. O. R. Dathorne’s study provides an …
Jambo Bwana
Archive and method in Queer African Studies
This writing considers the relationship between archive-production and archive-use and method in Queer African Studies. It turns to three sites. First, it examines an early document from Kenya's archives to examine what official archives can see and know, and how they might be used. Second, it draws attention to the often-overlooked archive of 1960s African liberation narratives that address and enflesh the figure of the homosexual within decolon…
Love
Reflections on Trans* & Taxonomy (with Neo Musangi)
This reflection juxtaposes African queer studies and visual studies to consider how African queerness is represented. Taking the work of Kenyan photographer Neo Musangi as its point of departure, it foregrounds questions raised by representations of trans individuals about the politics of knowledge and the ethics of opacity. As trans activists and intellectuals have noted, the visual is an especially vexed site of gendered policing, and I conside…
On Being Area-Studied
Research Article| April 01 2016 On Being Area-Studied: A Litany of Complaint Keguro Macharia Keguro Macharia Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2016) 22 (2): 183–189. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-3428711 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Keguro Macharia; On Being Area-Studied: A Litany of Complaint. GLQ 1 April 2016; 22 (2): 183–189. doi: https://doi.o…
Frottage
Winner, 2020 Alan Bray Memorial Prize, given by the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association A new understanding of freedom in the black diaspora grounded in the erotic In Frottage , Keguro Macharia weaves together histories and theories of blackness and sexuality to generate a fundamentally new understanding of both the black diaspora and queer studies. Macharia maintains that to reach this understanding, we must start from the black diasp…
The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies
This chapter examines queer digital culture, a term that refers to the ways in which LGBTQ+ identities, practices, and theories have been mixed up in the emergence, design, and constitution of digital technology. It highlights significant shifts at the intersections of queer identity and politics and digital communication technologies from the 1980s to the early twenty-first century, including transitions from textual to audiovisual media; from s…
Afterword
Afterword: Across Difference, Toward Freedom Keguro Macharia (bio) Invitation I was delighted when SA Smythe invited me to write this Afterword. It extended an earlier invitation issued in 2018 to participate in a symposium, “Troubling the Grounds: Global Figurations of Blackness, Nativism, and Indigeneity,” held in May 2019. My response to Dr. Smythe was short: “My mother has cancer—not a secret—and I’m her primary caregiver. I’m unable to trave…
Belated
The article "belated : interruption" stages an encounter between queer and Africa
Frottage
“Frottage” elaborates a conceptual framework for the book. It describes how black diasporic geohistories reframe queer studies and how queer studies, in turn, reframe black diaspora studies. I identify three key terms in black diaspora studies: kinship, hybridity, and thinghood. Dominant approaches in black diaspora studies have framed the black diaspora as a search for kinship, whether biological or fictive, creating what I describe as a genealo…
Invitation
Subversion has been the dominant orientation in queer studies, not invitation. We are to refuse and resist and destroy and fuck it all up. The we-ness of this we emerges through this shared resistance to normativity and its promises and lies. Occasionally, we are permitted tenderness, but it is often so fleeting as to be insignificant. Occasionally, we are permitted vulnerability, but we know the dangers of being vulnerable, so we sharpen our wit…
With Gratitude, Toward Freedom
You don’t have revolution without sound’
A Questionnaire on Diaspora and the Modern
The twentieth century was deeply grooved with the trodden pathways of mass migrations. These journeys were propelled by violence and historical cataclysm: pogroms and genocides; natural and unnatural famines and disasters; land dispossession, regimes of apartheid and forced labor; revolution, war, and occupation; colonization and decolonization; and the realignments that followed in their wake. The pioneering sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois may have…
Dear Hugo
After Exorcism
Thank you to Gibson Ncube, Naminata Diabate, T.J. Tallie, Xavier Livermon, Hugo ka Canham, and Z’étoile Imma for accepting the invitation to think with me. Invitations are fraught things: you never
Sociology (12 works) · Art (11 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · History (9 works) · Political science (8 works) · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues (7 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · African history and culture studies (5 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · History (5 works)