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The African Studies Workshop at Harvard continues this year with a new and exciting schedule of presenters. The presenters' papers explore Africa’s changing place in the world - and the new economies, legalities, socialities, and cultural forms that have arisen there. We shall also interrogate the claim that the African present is a foreshadowing of processes beginning to occur elsewhere across the globe; that, therefore, it is a productive source of theory and analysis about current conditions worldwide. At each workshop, a scholar presents a paper on one facet of the rapidly changing position of Africa in the global political economy and the impact of that change on global distributions of wealth, well-being, and power. Then a discussant provides commentary followed by an open discussion, in which students are given the floor first, followed by anyone else in attendance. Workshop presenters are scholars of high international repute as well as up and coming Africanist intellectuals.
Join us on March 18 from 4-6pm for the Spring 2024 African Studies Workshop with Danson Sylvester Kahyana presenting: Uganda's Anti Homosexuality Act (2023) as a Threat to Political and Artistic Freedoms.
Discussant: Karen Thornber, Harvard University
Abstract: On May 26, 2023, Uganda’s President, General Yoweri Museveni, assented to the Anti-Homosexuality Act (2023), thereby bringing into force a law that has been considered perhaps the most severe in the world, what with its provision for the death penalty and long prison sentences for certain homosexual acts. In this paper, I examine the threats to political and artistic freedoms that the law poses. I argue that while the law claims to defend African morality, its actual intent is to curtail political dissent by punishing people who are targeted not just for their sexuality, but also for their critical views. The data I work with come from different sources – the experience of a former student of mine (whose Undergraduate project was pulled down the University library website because the librarians were afraid its homoerotic content would get them into trouble); interviews with some writers and political activists, and a close reading of the law and relevant literature. In my analysis, I draw from Michel Foucault’s book, Discipline and Punish (to underline the repressive aspects of the law) and Homi K. Bhabha’s essay, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation” (to tease out the paradoxes inherent in the law – producing one morally upright Uganda while scattering several minorities).
Danson Sylvester Kahyana is an Associate Professor in the Department of Literature, Makerere University, Uganda. He holds a PhD in English Studies from Stellenbosch University, South Africa. His critical work has appeared in English in Africa, Journal of African Cultural Studies, and Social Dynamics, among others. He is a recipient of the Social Science Research Council’s African Peacebuilding Network (APN) Individual Research Fellowship (2022), the Fulbright Research Fellowship (2020), and the American Council of Learned Societies’ African Humanities Programme Postdoctoral Fellowship (2015), among others. He is President Emeritus, Ugandan PEN, and a former Board member, PEN International. He is currently a scholar at risk at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard Kennedy School.