Primitive normativity : race, sexuality, and temporality in colonial Kenya

Williams, Elizabeth W. 1986- (author.).

Summary: "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"--

Record details

ISBN: 9781478025498
ISBN: 9781478020714
ISBN: 1478025492
ISBN: 1478020717
ISBN: 9781478027621
ISBN: 1478027622
Physical Description: 1 online resource (xiv, 235 pages)
remote
Computer data.
Publisher: Durham : Duke University Press, 2024.
Copyright: �2024

Content descriptions

General Note:	CatMonthString:january.24 Multi-User.
Bibliography, etc. Note:	Includes bibliographical references and index.
Formatted Contents Note:	Primitive Normativity -- The Intellectual Roots of Primitive Normativity -- Sleeping Dictionaries and Mobile Metropoles: Female (A)Sexuality in the Silberrad Scandal of 1908 -- "Stoop Low to Conquer": Primitive Normativity and Trusteeship in the Kenyan "Indian Crisis" of 1923 -- White Peril: Rape, Race, and Contamination -- Queering Settler Romance: The Reparative Eugenic Landscape in Nora Strange's Kenyan Novels -- Eating the Other: Erotic Consumption in Anti-Mau Mau Discourse.
Type of Computer File or Data Note:	Text (HTML), electronic book.
System Details Note:	Mode of access: Internet.
Terms Governing Use and Reproduction Note:	Access requires VIU IP addresses and is restricted to VIU students, faculty and staff. Access restricted by subscription.
Issuing Body Note:	Made available online by JSTOR.
Source of Description Note:	Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on November 08, 2023).