Contested Borders by William J Spurlin

Contested Borders by William J Spurlin

Contested Borders broadens understandings of dissident sexualities in Africa through focusing specifically on the Maghreb where gender/sexual politics have emerged under a different set of historical, material, and ideological conditions compared with sub-Sahara Africa, which has been the focus of much of the scholarship on African sexualities. It examines new representations of same-sex desire emerging in new francophone life writing, memoir, and literature from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, where long-established traditions pertaining to gender and sexuality are brought into contact with new forms of gender and sexual dissidence, resulting from the inflection of globally-circulating discourses and embodiments of queerness in Africa, and from the experience of emigration and settlement by the writers concerned in France. The book analyses how such writers as Rachid O., Abdellah Ta a, Eyet Ch kib Djaziri, Nina Bouraoui, foreground translation and narrative reflexivity around incommensurable spaces of queerness in order to index their crossings and negotiations of multiple languages, histories, cultures. By writing in French, it argues that these writers are not merely mimicking the language of their former coloniser, but inflecting a European language with vocabularies and turns of phrase indigenous to North Africa, thus creating new possibilities of meaning and expression to name their lived experience of gender and sexual otherness--a form of (queer) translational praxis that destabilises received gender/sexual categories both within the Maghreb and in Europe.

The book effectively illustrates the prowess of these writers who do not fit into national identities or Western sexual identities as they use their autofiction for self-discoveryIn this regard, the book offers a welcome look at queer migrant perspectives from France, which feels incredibly important given the political realities and colonialist history of France. * African Studies Review *
William Spurlin's Contested Borders: Queer Politics and Cultural Translation in Contemporary Francophone Writing from the Maghreb is a rigorously researched and critically incisive account of Franco-Maghrebi writing. Spurlin's intersectional analysis is equally attentive to geography, race, gender, sexuality, and language. Simultaneously invoking, departing from, and moving beyond the critical and creative archive of works from the region, the author's attention to new spaces of dissident sexualities leads to future directions for research in the area. Contested Borders is a must read for scholars in Postcolonial, Middle Eastern and North African, and Sexuality Studies. -- Kanika Batra, Texas Tech University, author of Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities: Publics, Counterpublics, Human Rights

Written in Spurlin’s usual deft style, Contested Borders surveys an impressive range of feminist and queer Maghrebian texts, part of the region’s long tradition of writing about same-sex desire. The authors of these texts, living in between radically different languages, histories, and cultures, visit upon those uncomfortable with the globe’s increasing
fragmentation the truths, triumphs, and fragilities of those living beyond essentialized Western categories and indigenous cultural taboos.

-- Wendy Laura Belcher, Princeton University
Contested Borders is timely and makes an immense contribution to our understanding of queer sexualities in the Maghreb and by extension in Africa. To date, this is the only monograph in English on the Maghreb that brings to our attention important questions of our time: life writing, sites of memory, translation, globalization, and queer theory. -- Naminata Diabate, Cornell University

William J. Spurlin is Professor Emeritus and Honorary Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Brunel University of London, UK.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781538168080
ISBN 10	1538168081
Title	Contested Borders
Author	William J Spurlin
Series	Critical Perspectives On Theory Culture And Politics
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Year published	2026-04-30
Number of pages	262
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.