The Languages of Postqueerness renders a reading of postqueer personhood on the African continent that is as nuanced as it is diverse.Transafrica covers material from southern Africa, West Africa, and Islamic Africa-including East Africa-through what emerges as a multifaceted spectrum of case studies.Chapters include reviews of fiction, autofiction, historical analysis, and contemporary testimonies rooted in lived experience.The postqueer expressions contained therein involve mediums from literature and poetry to public engagements and architectural design, all of which speak to a sense of diffused coherence in positioning postqueerness within African cosmologies.Much of the content requires a background knowledge of the topic literature and can be dense at times, but that perspective is hardly a critique given that the volume would be unlikely to coalesce in such a welldeveloped way through different means.The choice of "postqueer" rather than "queer" reflects the anthology's emphasis on locating identity in relation to the nexus of Eurocentric intellectual frameworks for queerness and connected, yet non-analogous developments on the African continent.This formulation embodies the drive to supersede each trajectories' discourses through orienting non-heteronormative genders and sexualities as both culturally and historically inherent, as well as being sociopolitically emergent in the contemporary era.As many of the collection's contributors allude to, "queer" often represents liberational, secular frameworks in the West, while the term has been incorporated into an internally repressive rhetoric of anticolonial rejection in African nations."Postqueer" becomes a more appropriate mechanism to describe the subjectivities of personhood and identity in a way that draws on indigeneity as a means to carve out a place for those belonging to the postqueer to resist condemnation by dominant norms in various African societies.As the editors enunciate, "postqueer" serves four functions in the volume: (1) It integrates African linguistic traditions such as in Logan February's account of pronoun fluidity; (2) It maps postsecularism in the postqueer escape through uniquely African forms of imported religion (Pentecostal Christianity) as well as some of the multigendered spiritual legacies of the precolonial era; (3) It facilitates the articulation of self through narration in chapters such as Chantal Zabus's account of "translects," where the incongruencies of gender and sexuality between members of a group make any real reconciliation of tidy academic terminology
Ben Weiss (2026) studied this question.