Naminata Diabate
Biographic Data
| ID | 187718 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Naminata Diabate |
| GIVEN NAMES | Naminata |
| FAMILY NAME | Diabate |
| SIGNATURE | DIABATE N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Cornell University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2782-6761 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Naked agency, agency brokers, and the ethics of responsibility
It is a rare and humbling experience to see one’s work travel—across disciplines, continents, and theoretical frameworks—in ways one had not fully anticipated. The eight responses gathered in this
African Literature in Transition
This book offers a compelling new approach to African literatures as formed by and itself a form of collective memory. It explores the historical spaces and maps that African literature brings to the surface and re-imagines in novel ways. The stories that matter about what happened in the past together constitute a collective memory that African writers and readers draw upon to locate themselves within the world. The book examines the mental maps…
Aestheticizing and Archiving the Women’s War of 1929 and the 1949 Women’s March on the Grand-Bassam Prison
This chapter examines how francophone and anglophone fiction restages and archives women’s forms of resistance against colonial ideologies and practices. The Women’s War of 1929 in Igboland, the 1933 Togolese market women uprisings against taxation, the 1934 beer boycott in colonial Zimbabwe, the 1947 women’s demonstrations against taxation in Yorubaland, the 1949 women’s march in Côte d’Ivoire, the 1958 women’s mass protests in the Cameroon Gras…
Desiring speculation and K’eguro Macharia’s out-bounds methods
Being Granular About Defiant Disrobing
In early 2021, when I read Naminata Diabate's first academic monograph, Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa (2020), I was gripped by Diabate's careful and expansive thinking about the phenomenon of defiant disrobing by women in Africa. I interviewed Diabate via email in late 2021 about her book. Our extended conversation covers Diabate's motivations for writing her book, the idea of "naked agency" as a way of reading defiant d…
(Digital) anthologies and genre
“Our reticence [to discuss sex in public] is therefore understandable, but not acceptable when it seeps into our literature” (v) declares Sibbyl Akwaugo Whyte in her introduction to the 2018 electronic collection Erotic Africa: The Sex Anthology. Back in 2014-2015, Léonora Miano rejected the muzzling effects of racialization that until recently has led Francophone sub-Saharan and Afrodiasporic writers to suppress their sexuality. Miano’s rebellio…
Afri-Queer Fugitivity in African Cinema
Speaking of Queer African Cinema's scope, Lindsey Green-Simms declares that her book should not be read as definitive or encyclopedic. Rather, it should be seen as a useful set of readings and a model of reading for scholars, activists, and filmmakers. Independently of that claim, the insightful study in four chapters fulfills the encyclopedic (in its erudition) function in addition to accomplishing what the author set out to do. In its curation …
Going a piece of the way with Carole Boyce Davies’s migrating subject
This essay draws on Carole Boyce Davies’s influential Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994), and its theory of subjectivity as movement, to highlight Davies’s contribution to reconceptualizing efforts of black subjectivity. Relatedly, the essay teases out the potential new uses of the conceptual avenues she opened up thirty years ago. Exploring defiant disrobing within the Black Lives Matter demonstrations; not so mu…
Whither homework or fieldwork? On díya, plaisir, and pleasure
On Visuals and Selling the Promise of Sexual Plaisir and Pleasure in Abidjan
Diabate examines images and news reports about rampant sexual permissiveness in Abidjan and its online environs. Attention to the visual dimension of this pleasure explosion highlights the presence of homines economici. Considering buyers of aphrodisiacs or butt/breast-enhancing products not as uninformed agents, but instead as rational actors who are sensitive to images leads makers and retailers to invest in branding and marketing. Thus, these …
Nudity and Pleasure
Cultural products and discourses about erotic pleasure have recently proliferated, leading to what the author calls “the pleasure turn.” In studies of African culture, “the pleasure turn” can be read as decentering the dominant paradigm that has mostly associated black nakedness with negative emotions: sorrow, pain, and humiliation. Illustrative of the turn is the 2009 exhibition Beauty and Pleasure in South African Contemporary Art, which consid…
Women’s Naked Protest in Africa
The publication of The Report on the State of the Discipline by the American Comparative Literature Association constitutes a prime opportunity for new theories, interpretive frameworks, and methods. I highlight the importance of fieldwork for Comparative Literature for two reasons: that it offers us the opportunity to make contact with certain marginalized groups, those with no access to the conventional channels of knowledge production, but who…
From Women Loving Women in Africa to Jean Genet and Race
(2009). From Women Loving Women in Africa to Jean Genet and Race: A Conversation with Frieda Ekotto. Journal of the African Literature Association: Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 181-203
On Visuals and Selling the Promise of Sexual Plaisir and Pleasure in Abidjan
Diabate examines images and news reports about rampant sexual permissiveness in Abidjan and its online environs. Attention to the visual dimension of this pleasure explosion highlights the presence of homines economici. Considering buyers of aphrodisiacs or butt/breast-enhancing products not as uninformed agents, but instead as rational actors who are sensitive to images leads makers and retailers to invest in branding and marketing. Thus, these …
Nudity and Pleasure
Cultural products and discourses about erotic pleasure have recently proliferated, leading to what the author calls “the pleasure turn.” In studies of African culture, “the pleasure turn” can be read as decentering the dominant paradigm that has mostly associated black nakedness with negative emotions: sorrow, pain, and humiliation. Illustrative of the turn is the 2009 exhibition Beauty and Pleasure in South African Contemporary Art, which consid…
(Digital) anthologies and genre
“Our reticence [to discuss sex in public] is therefore understandable, but not acceptable when it seeps into our literature” (v) declares Sibbyl Akwaugo Whyte in her introduction to the 2018 electronic collection Erotic Africa: The Sex Anthology. Back in 2014-2015, Léonora Miano rejected the muzzling effects of racialization that until recently has led Francophone sub-Saharan and Afrodiasporic writers to suppress their sexuality. Miano’s rebellio…
Going a piece of the way with Carole Boyce Davies’s migrating subject
This essay draws on Carole Boyce Davies’s influential Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994), and its theory of subjectivity as movement, to highlight Davies’s contribution to reconceptualizing efforts of black subjectivity. Relatedly, the essay teases out the potential new uses of the conceptual avenues she opened up thirty years ago. Exploring defiant disrobing within the Black Lives Matter demonstrations; not so mu…
From Women Loving Women in Africa to Jean Genet and Race
(2009). From Women Loving Women in Africa to Jean Genet and Race: A Conversation with Frieda Ekotto. Journal of the African Literature Association: Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 181-203
Women’s Naked Protest in Africa
The publication of The Report on the State of the Discipline by the American Comparative Literature Association constitutes a prime opportunity for new theories, interpretive frameworks, and methods. I highlight the importance of fieldwork for Comparative Literature for two reasons: that it offers us the opportunity to make contact with certain marginalized groups, those with no access to the conventional channels of knowledge production, but who…
Nudity and Pleasure
Cultural products and discourses about erotic pleasure have recently proliferated, leading to what the author calls “the pleasure turn.” In studies of African culture, “the pleasure turn” can be read as decentering the dominant paradigm that has mostly associated black nakedness with negative emotions: sorrow, pain, and humiliation. Illustrative of the turn is the 2009 exhibition Beauty and Pleasure in South African Contemporary Art, which consid…
Going a piece of the way with Carole Boyce Davies’s migrating subject
This essay draws on Carole Boyce Davies’s influential Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994), and its theory of subjectivity as movement, to highlight Davies’s contribution to reconceptualizing efforts of black subjectivity. Relatedly, the essay teases out the potential new uses of the conceptual avenues she opened up thirty years ago. Exploring defiant disrobing within the Black Lives Matter demonstrations; not so mu…
Whither homework or fieldwork? On díya, plaisir, and pleasure
On Visuals and Selling the Promise of Sexual Plaisir and Pleasure in Abidjan
Diabate examines images and news reports about rampant sexual permissiveness in Abidjan and its online environs. Attention to the visual dimension of this pleasure explosion highlights the presence of homines economici. Considering buyers of aphrodisiacs or butt/breast-enhancing products not as uninformed agents, but instead as rational actors who are sensitive to images leads makers and retailers to invest in branding and marketing. Thus, these …
(Digital) anthologies and genre
“Our reticence [to discuss sex in public] is therefore understandable, but not acceptable when it seeps into our literature” (v) declares Sibbyl Akwaugo Whyte in her introduction to the 2018 electronic collection Erotic Africa: The Sex Anthology. Back in 2014-2015, Léonora Miano rejected the muzzling effects of racialization that until recently has led Francophone sub-Saharan and Afrodiasporic writers to suppress their sexuality. Miano’s rebellio…
Afri-Queer Fugitivity in African Cinema
Speaking of Queer African Cinema's scope, Lindsey Green-Simms declares that her book should not be read as definitive or encyclopedic. Rather, it should be seen as a useful set of readings and a model of reading for scholars, activists, and filmmakers. Independently of that claim, the insightful study in four chapters fulfills the encyclopedic (in its erudition) function in addition to accomplishing what the author set out to do. In its curation …
African Literature in Transition
This book offers a compelling new approach to African literatures as formed by and itself a form of collective memory. It explores the historical spaces and maps that African literature brings to the surface and re-imagines in novel ways. The stories that matter about what happened in the past together constitute a collective memory that African writers and readers draw upon to locate themselves within the world. The book examines the mental maps…
Aestheticizing and Archiving the Women’s War of 1929 and the 1949 Women’s March on the Grand-Bassam Prison
This chapter examines how francophone and anglophone fiction restages and archives women’s forms of resistance against colonial ideologies and practices. The Women’s War of 1929 in Igboland, the 1933 Togolese market women uprisings against taxation, the 1934 beer boycott in colonial Zimbabwe, the 1947 women’s demonstrations against taxation in Yorubaland, the 1949 women’s march in Côte d’Ivoire, the 1958 women’s mass protests in the Cameroon Gras…
Desiring speculation and K’eguro Macharia’s out-bounds methods
Being Granular About Defiant Disrobing
In early 2021, when I read Naminata Diabate's first academic monograph, Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa (2020), I was gripped by Diabate's careful and expansive thinking about the phenomenon of defiant disrobing by women in Africa. I interviewed Diabate via email in late 2021 about her book. Our extended conversation covers Diabate's motivations for writing her book, the idea of "naked agency" as a way of reading defiant d…
Naked agency, agency brokers, and the ethics of responsibility
It is a rare and humbling experience to see one’s work travel—across disciplines, continents, and theoretical frameworks—in ways one had not fully anticipated. The eight responses gathered in this
Sociology (8 works) · African history and culture studies (6 works) · Art (6 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Gender Studies (5 works) · History (4 works) · History (4 works) · Pleasure (4 works) · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies (4 works)