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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 indigenous populations. She identifies a discourse of “primitive normativity” that suggested that Africans were too close to nature to develop sexual neuroses and practices such as hysteria, homosexuality, and prostitution which supposedly were common among Europeans. Primitive normativity framed Kenyan African sexuality as less polluted than that of the more deviant populations of their colonizers. 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 Kenyan 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.

Showing how twenty-first-century Black theater and media arts challenge dominant conceptualizations of time

Reclaiming Time: Race, Temporality, and Black Expressive Culture examines works by contemporary Black artists in multiple media—drama, film, performance art, and photography—that trouble dominant conceptualizations and normative configurations of time in relation to race in the twenty-first century. Isaiah Matthew Wooden explores the ways in which an intentional and sometimes ludic engagement with time and temporality has enabled these artists to probe urgent questions and themes concerning the conditions of contemporary Black life.

Wooden surveys a diverse array of performance-based and visual texts to explore the rich practices of contemporary Black expressive culture: dramatic works by playwrights Eisa Davis, Tarell Alvin McCraney, and Robert O’Hara; performance art and photography by visual artists Jefferson Pinder and LaToya Ruby Frazier; and feature-length cinema by director-producer Tanya Hamilton. These works expose normative time as specious and evidence the transformative potential in honing practices of Black temporal experimentation and intervention. By putting this cross-disciplinary set of texts in conversation with each other, Wooden sheds new light on the shrewd ways that they each reflect an investment in unbinding time from the exigencies of normativity and teleology, as well as on their shared commitments to reclaiming time to reimagine and represent Blackness in all its multiplicities.

The urge to engage with finitude is increasingly central in our present apocalyptic time of political and ecological turmoil. Aging populations and the rapid development of advanced, but expensive, technologies to ever further postpone death pose significant healthcare challenges for societies around the world. In these times, how do people care when the end of life is near? How do they orient toward death? Do they see death as an absolute end, and if not, what sort of horizon does death present? Questioning taken for granted assumptions about end-of-life care, When Death Is on the Horizon analyzes how people approach death in a wide variety of geographical locations and social contexts. Through in-depth ethnographic case studies, it shows how people orient toward, beyond, and away from death, and how they do so within a world marked by historic and ongoing socio-political and structural inequalities.

This book is also freely available online as an open access digital edition.