Queer complicity in the Belgian Congo: autobiography and racial fetishism in Jef Geeraerts' (post)colonial novels

In this essay, I present a “queer” reading of the (post)colonial novels by Jef Geeraerts, a Flemish author infamous for his explicit depictions of sex and violence in the Belgian Congo. I demonstrate how both his racism and misogyny feed on a homoerotic dynamic that appears to destabilize hegemonic colonial discourse, but is actually mobilized as a literary strategy to forge a new kind of white masculinity in the “heart of darkness.” Despite Geeraerts’s conscious anti-establishment modernism, this underlying and often overlooked homoerotics in ostensibly “heterosexual” novels is shown to be an accomplice of colonial power, silencing the black other and reaffirming a porno-tropic tradition of racial fetishism.

Publication year:2014

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Authors from:Higher Education