Constructing post-colonial African sexualities: Identities and discourses in mardia stone’s konkai and K. Sello duiker’s the quiet violence of dreams

In this article, my intention is to explore the radically different ways in which same-sex sexualities are being discursively constructed in two different parts of Africa. The texts’ different socio-political and geographic contexts serve to complicate singular understandings of how sexuality operates and is performed on the continent. The focus is on how different narrative modes – in particular, a memoir and a novel – construct and shift particular discursive practices and signifying systems regarding same-sex sexualities. It is the distinct genres and different geographic locations of Stone’s and Duiker’s texts that add depth and complexity to the study, which seeks to refute claims of an essentialist African sexuality.