Primitive Normativity

“Elizabeth W. Williams brings fresh insights from queer theory and Black feminist theory to the study of settler colonialism in East Africa. Through analyzing an expansive set of textual sources, she helpfully introduces discourses of sexual normativity and deviance as key to understanding colonial processes of racial formation and ongoing politics in the region.” - Lynn M. Thomas, author of Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya

“Primitive Normativity is a brilliant synthesis of queer theory, colonial history, and African studies. For Elizabeth W. Williams, the ‘strange settler space’ of Kenya depended upon a view of Africans as temporally backward and therefore safe from the dangers of sexually deviant, ‘over-civilized’ Europeans. Nimbly tracing discourses from the colonial archive, Williams offers an assessment of colonial sexuality and power that is as witty as it is incisive and compelling.” - T. J. Tallie, author of Queering Colonial Natal: Indigeneity and the Violence of Belonging in Southern Africa

". . . Williams has written an engaging, insightful, and generative book. It draws on a broad range of archival and print sources, engages effectively with the relevant secondary literature, and makes productively counterintuitive use of queer theory." - Dane Kennedy, International Journal of African Historical Studies

"Primitive Normativity is a groundbreaking and essential read for anyone interested in the intersections of race, sexuality, and colonialism. It accomplishes the goal of anti-colonial history, as Williams acknowledges, by allowing us to imagine new ways of being and knowing, thereby altering the continuing conditions of coloniality in the spaces we research and the spaces from which we write. This book is a powerful work that will influence and inspire future scholarship in the field. Producing a triumph of intellectual courage and witty excellence, Williams deserves her flowers for this seminal piece." - Bright Alozie, H-Africa, H-Net Reviews

"The book is valuable for myriad reasons including the juxtaposition of several insights that go against the grain of dominant knowledge of African sexuality, modernity, and temporality and thus offers new ways of reading that can be adapted beyond the continent. . . . Hence, the book’s utility transcends African and African diaspora studies to interlocking ways that powers seek to shape and conform their subjects through media, knowledge, or administration. In all, the author no doubt adds, extends, and offers profound insight that advances extant scholarship on race, gender, sexuality, settler colonialism, and postcolonial studies both on the continent and in the diaspora." - Rosemary Oyinlola Popoola, African Studies Review

"A book crackling with insight, wide ranging, incisive and beautifully written. For historians of colonial Kenya, this will be an essential addition to their bibliographies and reading lists. More broadly, this is a book that compels anyone interested in race and its relation to the intimate to think again about the making of difference and the reverberations of seemingly disparate bodies of knowledge through ordinary citizens’ and subjects’ lives." - Will Jackson, Africa

"This book joins a growing number of superb queer African or African queer history studies. . . . It should be mandatory reading for scholars and students of both African history and queer theory, as well as readers interested in comparative or global histories of sexuality." - Neville Hoad, Journal of the History of Sexuality