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 decolonising imaginations. It does so to question the privileging of the 1990s as the most crucial period in generating homo-themed discourses in Africa. Finally, in a ‘litany of complaints’, it suggests possible ways in which Queer African Studies might position itself alongside other fields of study, even as it generates its own archives and methods attentive to African histories and, more crucially, to the lives and bodies it seeks to make more possible.