Best Published Scholarly Essays 2021

QASA is delighted to announce the 2021 prize winners. The winners were announced at the recently concluded ASA meeting in Philadelphia. The Queer African Studies Association Prize for Best Published Scholarly Essay by a Junior Scholar is awarded for the best scholarly essays published in the field of queer African studies in the previous calendar year by an untenured scholar who is not a graduate student. We received a very large number of nominations this year.

Co-winners: Godfried Asante and Jodarche Ellapen

Godfried Asante’s article "Queer (Un)like Me: Contesting Sameness, Im/possibilities of Queer/Trans Allyship In Transnational Contexts" published in QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking offers an impressive theorizing of allyship. The article can be read here: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/851600/pdf

Jodarche Ellapen’s article, published in Feminist Formations, "Performing Blackness as Transgressive Erotics: African Futurities and Black Queer Sex in South African Live Art", offers innovative theorization and reading of eroticism. The article can be read here: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/802392

Honorable Mentions  

Wesly Macheso for the article “Vulnerability and the (im)possibilities of Becoming: Transgenderism in Contemporary South African Life Writing” (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14725843.2020.1803044?cookieSet=1) published in African Identities which offers an insightful reading of vulnerability of queer bodies in recent literary texts from South Africa

Seth Palmer's article, “Divine Monarchy, Spirited Sovereignties, and the Timely Malagasy MSM Medium-Activist Subject” is based on impressive field research and sheds important light on queerness on Madagascar, a country that is often marginalized in African Studies. Published in GLQ. The article can be read here: https://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-abstract/27/1/61/167438/Divine-Monarchy-Spirited-Sovereignties-and-the?redirectedFrom=fulltext

Kerry Manzo who offers meticulous close and fresh readings in the article "Sublimations and Shadows: Sexual Politics of Ibadan Modernism in Black Orpheus" appearing in Research in African Literatures. The article can be read here: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/856775

Princess Sibanda whose article “Rewriting and Re-Righting The African Queer Narrative Through Poetry” published in Imbiza Journal for African Writing embodies the very kind of re-reighting and re-writing that it discusses through offering a fresh form of academic writing. The article can be read here: https://www.imbizajournal.co.za/

Best Published Scholarly Essay by a Graduate Student 

Loes Oudenhuijsen for their article “Quietly Queer(Ing): the Normative Value of Sutura and Its Potential for Young Women in Urban Senegal”. The article can be read here:  https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/africa/article/quietly-queering-the-normative-value-of-sutura-and-its-potential-for-young-women-in-urban-senegal/F46DFCB94D51D43784F63C179ECF6ABA

We want to congratulate all the winners for their important work.

Look out for the call for nominations next year!