In the introductory chapter to Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora, Keguro Macharia observes, “I do not think black and queer play well together. I think they often inhabit the same spaces, and even the same bodies, in uncomfortable ways, and I want to foreground their ongoing rubbing, leading, at times, to pleasure, and, at other times, to irritation, and even possibly to pain” (5). Frictions between subjectivities, temporalities and discursive frameworks lie at the core of Frottage. A key point of friction between black diaspora studies and queer studies – two disciplines Macharia sets in conversation here – concerns their relation to kinship; with mainstream debates in the former deeming kinship foundational to community even as it exiles queer communities. Across Frottage, Macharia considers the frictions generated between varied configurations of black and queer in different geohistorical contexts, proposing frames that sidestep the genealogical imperative at the centre of kinship as the primary frame for black diasporic community. He reminds us that much of the friction between queer and black is generated by the conceptual freight borne by these categories, owing to colonial modernity's violent epistemic frameworks for understanding blackness, gender, sexuality and desire.

Macharia pinpoints a longing for intimacy in “the critical and historical desire to name the black diaspora as a singular formation, the desire of that definite article ‘the’” as one that has historically been articulated and gratified through genealogical logics of kinship (5). Turning away from these logics of kinship, he lingers on “conceptual and affective proximity: the rubbing produced by and as blackness, which assembles into one frame multiple histories and geographies” (5). The book develops frottage – a concept drawn from the art world – as both method and conceptual framework for tracing the place of intimacy in the making and sustenance of the black diaspora. Where genealogy and kinship have historically been taken for granted as the grounds for connection across the black diaspora, Macharia proposes intimacy and the accompanying frictions produced by proximity as a productive frame for understanding the black diaspora and its pursuit of freedom. Frottage as “a relation of proximity” is generative for figuring the black diaspora, not only because it unsettles the genealogical imperative and its heteronormative investments, but, importantly, because it “captures the aesthetic (as a term of artistic practice) and the libidinal (as a term of sex practice), and so gestures to the creative ways the sexual can be used to imagine and create worlds” (4).

In this way, frottage allows us to read diaspora as “a multiplicity of sense-apprehensions, including recognition, disorientation, compassion, pity, disgust, condescension, lust, titillation, arousal, and exhaustion” (5). This approach proposes a generative bridge between black diaspora and queer studies, a bridge built on the two disciplines’ shared vulnerability and their similar, but different, meditations on “the roles of pleasure in surviving ongoing unhumaning and crafting freedom dreams” (59). The key point here, as Macharia frames it via Hortense Spillers's work on the “captured sexualities” of enslaved Africans and Michel Foucault's cataloguing of the sexual, is that sexuality marks the cleavage between black diaspora studies and queer studies: “sexuality represents a vexed meting ground, the place where a blackness haunted by thinghood encounters a blackness haunted by subjectification” (27).

Macharia concedes that far from offering a full narrative, frottage points to traces which “demonstrate that someone or something has passed through a space and left some kind of evidence” (4). These traces – similar to the light traces of the homosexual in Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks and Jomo Kenyatta's Facing Mount Kenya examined in the first and third chapters respectively – become an unlikely source of sustenance by laying the foundation for speculation, which in turn “enlarge[s] our apprehension of the world and our possibilities for being in the world” (5). Beyond this scope for speculation, frottage is compelling to Macharia's project of imagining freedom in large part because it retains attention on the body while indexing some degree of the awkwardness, pleasure, and even irritation produced by black and queer, and Africa and Afro-diaspora, rubbing against each other (5). It is this range of affects produced by frottage that makes it a valuable frame for capturing intra-racial experiences along with “the active and dynamic ways blackness is produced and contested and celebrated and lamented as a shared object” (7).

The principal question that preoccupies Frottage is how erotics are framed and understood in ways that serve the project of imagining freedom across different geohistories as represented by four colonial subjects: Frantz Fanon, René Maran, Jomo Kenyatta and Claude McKay. What ties the four thinkers together is their use of the intimate, and specifically the sexual, in imagining and theorizing black being and belonging. Across the book, Macharia's reading of the four figures’ work locates the intimate and the erotic in their respective locations as colonial subjects each imagining and pursuing freedom in contexts that precede the nation-state and the postcolonial frameworks within which each of them tends to be read. Here, Macharia centres geohistories – where and when the thinkers he engages with are thinking from, and the ways in which these geohistorical locations mark their thought – thus proposing a useful strategy for managing the anxieties of difference that often delimit how we frame debates, which thinkers we set in conversation and how we motivate our choices. He brings together figures and geohistories that are rarely sat side by side: Jamaica and precolonial Gikuyu, Central Africa and Martinique, Kenyatta and René Maran.

“Frantz Fanon's Homosexual Territories,” the first of the four core chapters in Frottage, makes two observations: first, that another way of reading Fanon's much-chastised engagement with homosexuality is to consider that the homosexual haunts Fanon's theory of colonial modernity; second, that the genealogy of the white homosexual offered by Foucault is impossible to imagine without the black body (31). Teasing out Fanon's commentary on homosexuality, alongside his mapping of the black man's figuration as genital and biological in colonial modernity, Macharia concludes, given that “to desire sexual contact with another man is always to confront the figure of the black man who incarnates sex, [m]ight blackness be the very core of queer desire?” (44). Frottage considers the spectre of homosexual desire across Fanon's thought as pointing to an inability to “imagine the possibility of the desiring black homosexual within the frames provided by colonial modernity” in large part because the imaginary at the core of colonial modernity figures the black man as sexual aggressor, but also because the saturating sociogeny that frames black and white imaginaries of desire inescapably frames intra-black desire within the same negrophobic logic that reduces the black man to the figuration of genital and sexual aggressor. This take on Fanon opens up new lines of inquiry into the vexed question of Fanon's place in queer studies.

Macharia then turns to René Maran's Batouala (1921), widely considered a foundational novel in twentieth-century black diaspora writing. Here, he explores how Maran marshals the affordances of the ethnographic novel to map a collectivity sustained through erotic diversity and pleasure in early colonial Africa. Maran holds out the possibility of the erotic as a site where “Africa and Afro-diaspora meet on the shared grounds of memory and fantasy, imagination and ethnography” (61, 63), but, as Macharia laments, this possibility comes tinted with colonial modernity's epistemic frames that shift these erotic practices from glorious celebration of sacred erotics to the zone of perversion (83).

The third chapter examines Jomo Kenyatta as an ethno-national and Afro-diasporic thinker who mobilizes ethnicity as a mode to think through gender and sexuality while retaining a genealogical logic. Following Brent Edwards, Macharia avers that diasporic works, “though local and particular, do not offer a singular vision of political organization [but] are also fundamentally about trying to bridge cultural and historical gaps [and] account for difference among African-derived populations” (113). This is the sense from which Macharia reads Facing Mount Kenya as a diasporic text concerned with managing colonial modernity's disruptions of sex and gender logics both in colonial Kenya and in Afro-diasporic Europe. Frottage demonstrates how Kenyatta's tenure as editor of the Kikuyu-language newspaper Muigwithania nurtured in him an understanding of patriarchal alliances forged through the enforcement of gender and sexual normativity, a stance he would later activate by drawing on myth to craft normative conceptions of gender and sex in Facing Mount Kenya (108). “For Kenyatta,” writes Macharia, “it was crucial to write into being a form of blackness that bridged national and diasporic communities” (112).

The last chapter demonstrates that Claude McKay's creative exploration of Jamaican histories shows black diasporic practices of intimacy as foundational in countering the logics of modernity (129). Drawing on McKay's Banana Bottom (1933) and Constab Ballads (1912), the chapter argues that approaching McKay's queer aesthetic from the vantage point of Jamaican histories not only decentres Europe and the United States from interpretations of his thought, but further allows alternative interpretive lenses to surface (130). Banana Bottom “depicts flexible modes of belonging rooted in a wide range of intimate practices [where] queer genealogies of intimacy provide powerful paradigms for creating dense, rewarding networks of association and affiliation, spaces and practices where queer diasporic radicals can belong” (163).

In the end, Frottage achieves what Macharia considers to be a defining feature of Audre Lorde's work: like Lorde, it models “how to read across geohistories, across difference, toward freedom” (53), perhaps most beautifully in its closing chapter, where the dereliction of discipline that gently pulses under the surface from chapter 1 bursts forth in a beautifully poetic conclusion.

In the two responses below, Khwezi Mkhize and Gibson Ncube demonstrate how Macharia's conceptualization of frottage is productive in making sense of the interface between blackness, diaspora and queer desire in two contexts: early twentieth-century South Africa and late twentieth-century Maghreb. In their meditation, Mkhize and Ncube accept Macharia's invitation to imagine, and to linger with the mixed bounty generated by the frictions of intra-black subjectivities and their encounters with colonial modernity's discursive frameworks. The set closes with a brief response from Macharia.

Mkhize embraces Frottage's invitation to linger with marginalia – “those aspects of texts, encounters and experiences that appear to yield so little that we'd be wont to discard them” – and uses this to read Peter Abrahams's portrait of the mining compound in apartheid South Africa as generating new homosocial and homoerotic socialities that displace kinship, for the black male migratory subject, in his novel Return to Goli (1953). South African-born novelist and essayist Peter Abrahams (1919–2017) is an interesting figure to read through the lens of diaspora and particularly Macharia's interest in the frictions of intra-black encounter. Abrahams spent close to two decades (1939–56) in London, where he interacted closely with major figures in the pan-African movement, including George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta, before moving to Jamaica in 1956, where he lived until his death in 2017. Through Abrahams, Mkhize reads Frottage as a powerful counterdiscourse to the prioritization of heteromasculine encounters in anticolonial nationalisms by offering “a way to recuperate the plural sexual and gender counter-currents that were swept to the margins of the social.”

Ncube finds in the concept of frottage a generative entry point into thinking through the complexity of the queer subjectivities in the Maghreb – or what he terms, following Jarrod Hayes, the queer ghosts that haunt the Maghreb – a region already marked by frictions of un/belonging splintered along geographical, racial, linguistic and religious lines, as Arab cultural proximity rubs against African geographical location, French colonial brutalization and Islam. Ncube suggests that the task of forging queer genealogies of intimacy set out by Frottage is powerfully resonant in the Maghreb, even if, similar to sub-Saharan Africa, and indeed the black world broadly, it demands a simultaneous attentiveness to the discursive freight of orientalist imaginaries of the Arab world as hyper-eroticized. For him, “through rubbing against the skin of the illegible, it is possible to uncover traces which can be weaved together to create coherent narratives of what it means to be queer in the Maghreb.”

The two responses by Mkhize and Ncube, while geohistorically located in South Africa and the Maghreb respectively, demonstrate what comes to view when we attend to colonial modernity, empire and racial capital's instrumentalization of the erotic and intra-black frictions to deflect attention from a global black unhumaning that traces its roots to chattel slavery. In sum, Frottage and this set of responses to it convene a fine-textured conversation between the taken-for-granted epistemic frames at the intersection of American, black, African, queer and diaspora studies. For scholars of American studies, this conversation not only interrogates foundational frames that have been definitive in the subdisciplines of diaspora studies and black studies, but it further brings Africa and the Caribbean back into the frame, after a lengthy exile, during which these two regions’ mutual implication in shaping American political and cultural histories had been deemphasized.

In a scene in Return to Goli (1953), his well-known book on his reckoning with the social realities of apartheid after a fourteen-year absence, the novelist and essayist Peter Abrahams (1919–2017) describes the effect of mine compounds on black male sexuality. In a book of reportage reflecting on the psychology of oppression and the experience of racial otherness in South Africa, Abrahams's turn toward prose fiction, brief as it is, opens up dimensions of black sexuality that the book seems to discard or is unable to resolve.

The scene lasts for only five pages and introduces us to Dladla, a mineworker newly arrived in Johannesburg. Because, as we are told, “A man needs a guide here, for this place can be strange to a stranger,” Dladla is initiated into the sociality of the compounds by an unnamed fellow mineworker.Footnote ¹ The two men's conversation inevitably turns to a glaring problem of life in the compounds. As migrants now subject to seasonal family and conjugal visits, what is to be of erotic life in the mine compounds?

The conversation between the two men begins with a desire for intimacy with women. However, Dladla's guide laments that urban life has irrevocably transformed his desire:

The theme rehearsed in this passage is a familiar one. The migratory subject's encounter with urban modernity alienates him from the home which now represents both stasis and a tradition. In the end, his encounters with racial capitalism and the injuries of racial oppression in Johannesburg will not override his desire for the pleasures and anguishes proffered by city life. The unnamed narrator's alienation signals his distance from the homeland, from the family and from the tradition that they signify. But, I would argue, this alienation is as sexual as it is familial and cultural. In fact, the passage seems to depict urban modernity as most intimately symptomatized by the sexual abandonment of the figure of the black woman: “There was no pleasure in lying with her.” The effect of the encounter with Johannesburg is that the erotic life of the mining worker is now no longer tethered to the woman as an object either of desire or of lived sexuality. The experience of urban modernity for the migratory black male subject, then, is one that pushes heterosexual norms beyond their limits as new homosocial and homoerotic socialites offer alternative forms of kinship.

Dladla's guide soon points out to him two men having sex with each other (The compounds decidedly forced black male workers and their bodies into radical proximity. Indeed, a report from 1915 observed, “Each dormitory (sleeping room) accommodates 40 boys” in a compound that held 1,100 workers.Footnote ³ In shock, Dladla enquires whether these men could not seek sexual relief from “the harlots of the city.” The complex bureaucracy of the compound system (permission must be granted by an induna, who must then arrange for a pass before the applicant is left to find warmth in the city) and the impatience of sex workers empty any real intimacy from the encounters, often leaving the men destitute and emasculated: “Would you have them do it for pleasure? It is their work, just as the mine is our work. We work hard and we work fast, so do they.”Footnote ⁴ The last exchanges between the two men opens up a dialogue with Keguro Macharia's book that I find arresting:

Of course, one can read the turn to homosexual desire and practice as a compensation for the lack of women in the compounds and the indifferent sexual labour of the women of the night. But what does one make, then, of the final question: “What is natural?”

In Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora, Keguro Macharia opens up two lines of enquiry and theorization that I find generative, especially when placed alongside texts that represent taken-for-granted themes and nodes in literary and intellectual history such as Return to Goli. Macharia foregrounds sex, sexuality, embodiment and desire at the forefront of diaspora and formations of blackness. He also insists that we stick with and think through marginalia, those aspects of texts, encounters and experiences that appear to yield so little that we'd be wont to discard them.

Frottage names, for Macharia, a “conceptual strategy” for reading the black diaspora in a way that departs from “the logic of kinship,” a logic that comes from the desire to “name the black diaspora as a singular formation” (5). What happens to blackness, asks Macharia, when it functions without the anchor of “a genealogical tree”? Rather than linger on the desire for oneness (“a singular formation”), Macharia opts for a “queerer account of how diaspora functions as intimacy”; that is, in the regions of affect and embodiment that encompass “recognition, disorientation, compassion, pity, disgust, condescension, lust, titillation, arousal, and exhaustion” (5). Macharia's conceptualization of the black diaspora is one that requires embodiment but also a structure of feeling that remains haunted by the incommensurabilities of desire and relation (in Edouard Glissant's sense). As Macharia argues, because frottage is produced by an intimacy that invites irritation it is well placed to conceptualize the affect of diasporic relation:

Perhaps, put differently, one could see frottage as functioning alongside décalage, that French term so productively taken up by Brent Hayes Edwards in The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation and the Rise of Black Internationalism (2003). Similarly to Macharia, Edwards insists that since the politics of diaspora require acts of translation, both linguistic and epistemological, one must always attend to the differences that acts of diasporic apprehension seek to bridge but that nevertheless linger and continue to haunt it.Footnote ⁶ Macharia pushes the field of black diaspora studies forward by drawing our attention to the question of sexuality and queerness in diasporic formation. If what sustains diasporic desire and its imaginaries is the genealogical claim of “intra-racial collectivity” and its historical continuity, however imagined, then Macharia reminds us that we must also attend to how “genealogical models … generate social and cultural legibility” in ways that privilege “reproductive heteromornativity” (9).

Indeed, as Macharia recalls, the ideas that became Frottage germinated in his childhood reading of Alex Haley's Roots (1976). It was his encounter with the hold of the slave ship and the bodies of the enslaved as they experienced the “enforced proximity, this monstrous intimacy,” that was itself a site of frottage. Frottage because, aside from the sheer visceralness of body against body, it was also a process that reconstituted gender. This subject-making process (“how humans are transformed into objects”) of enslavement meant at least, as Hortense Spillers has pointed out, the loss of “gender difference in the outcome” since the body of the enslaved had become “a territory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all gender-related, gender-specific” (quoted at 24, Spillers's emphasis). Blackness, at least in this iteration of subjection through the Middle Passage, is essential to the genealogy of transness precisely because, as C. Riley Snorting argues, it “gave rise to an understanding of gender as mutable, and as an amendable form of being” (quoted at 24–25).

If this queer reading of the black diaspora seems available only through the Middle Passage, leaving Africa as the putative sign of some kind of origin (a project that Macharia is decidedly not invested in), Frottage offers some useful ways of reading African subjectivities and their literary inscription in the inchoate terrain of “desire and intimacy” that was colonial modernity (61). Macharia brings his acute theorizations and careful eye to a rereading of canonical texts in black diasporic literature. For instance, his reading of the female character Yassigui'ndja in René Maran's novel Batouala (1921) opens the path for Macharia to recuperate how, faced with “the new moment of colonial modernity,” an African woman could break out of the dominant “duty-over-desire” ideology of patriarchy and project desire beyond the “hetero-reproductive injunction” (73). Macharia offers a queer reading of Maran's ethnographic representation of the Banda people's ga'nza ceremony, a ceremony and rite in which boys and girls are transitioned into adulthood but which opens up all manner of transgression against custom. Again, it is Yassigui'ndja's presence which offers a vital queering of the ritual and the gender assignment that it performs. Yassingui'ndja, wearing a wooden phallus, enters a performance of sex with a virgin girl, as her husband, the powerful patriarch and the novel's protagonist Batouala, sings the refrain “Man is made for woman / And woman for man” (85). As Macharia agues, while the version of the meaning of the interaction authenticated by Batouala seeks to reinforce the primacy of the heterosexual norm, “Yassigui'ndja's sex-gender performance marks ‘man’ and ‘woman’ as sex-gender performances” (85). Within both the authority of tradition and the emergent displacement that it undergoes through the encounter with colonialism, the putatively natural role that heterosexuality and duty-bound femininity are allocated is suspended by other sexual alternatives. If anticolonial nationalism, as a political and aesthetic project, pivoted around masculine encounters and antagonisms, Frottage offers a way to recuperate the plural sexual and gender countercurrents that were swept to the margins of the social as the rumblings of postcolonialism were beckoning from yonder.

Macharia's literary and theoretical explorations are generative precisely because they are gesturing at an archive of black queer cultures, often located in canonical texts that are not overtly associated with queer studies. And even here, in the margins of these texts, the fleeting moments that seem brushed aside by the larger architecture of the narrative, lie new insights. It is for this reason that, when reading Abrahams's Return to Goli in light of Frottage, black masculinity is no longer tasked with the singular and overwhelming shadow of apartheid and its Manichaean socialities, but with the question of the profound challenge to its sexuality that Dladla has to make a lived response to as his life in Johannesburg unfolds: “What is natural?”

In reading and rereading Keguro Macharia's Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora, I have often been reminded of Jacques Derrida's concept of “hauntology.” Derrida coined the term “hauntology” (a portmanteau of “haunting” and “ontology”) in his seminal book Specters of Marx (1994). He used this term to describe the reappearance or persistence of elements of/from the past, in the same way that a ghost does, “this non-object, this non-present present.”Footnote ¹ He developed this concept from his previous work on deconstruction, especially the notion of “traces.” A “trace,” in Derrida's theorization, refers to a mark that is present in the here and now of something that no longer exists. In French, and indeed in English as well, the verb “to trace” (tracer) has several denotations that include to follow, to track, to outline, to mark and also to travel. To understand this “here” and “now” something, it is necessary to gaze beyond the absence and to read in the trace(s) an origin, a form of presence. The trace is a remainder or that which is left behind from an original presence which is absent in the now. Jarrod Hayes, in his book Queer Roots for the Diaspora: Ghosts in the Family Tree, attests to the need “to explore the conjuring of ghosts as the basis for additional strategies for understanding the traces of the past in present, particularly present identities and/or subjectivities.”Footnote ² This conjuring of the past requires a return to “queer roots” through the critical practice of situating narratives within the broader contexts in which they are produced.

I evoke the Derridian concepts of “hauntology” and “traces,” as well as Hayes's thinking through “queer roots,” as these ideas find resonance in Macharia's book. Frottage in Macharia's argument is a method that allows for the uncovering of the traces of the past as a way of creating “usable histories and livable lives” (3). Frottage as a method draws on the artistic technique of Max Ernst and “consists of layering paper over a surface (a floor or a desk, say), and using charcoal or pencil to rub over the paper to reveal the traces history has left on that surface” (4). Frottage as a methodological intervention thus sets out to read, speculate and create meaning from the “traces” that are made evident through rubbing against the past lives, archives, recorded histories and narratives. Macharia clearly highlights that frottage, as a method and critical praxis, “does not provide a complete narrative or even signal where the researcher should look” (4). What frottage does, though, is to allow for an engagement with the traces and fragments of queer subjectivities. Such lingering over traces and fragments enables the realization “of a broader reparative goal: to find ‘sustenance’ where it has been deemed absent or scarce” (5).

My encounter with Frottage comes at a time when I have been grappling with how to make sense of what Hayes calls “the queer ghosts that haunt” the Maghreb.Footnote ³ In the Maghreb, queer and a somewhat conflicted sense of Africanness/blackness “do not play well together” (5), to use Macharia's phrasing. The Maghreb lies in a liminal space in that it fails to fit easily into the Arab world because of its particular history as a French colony. Concurrently, it does integrate with sub-Saharan Africa and the French-speaking world owing to its “Arabness.” The combined effect of the conflict elaborated above, as well as Islam, has ensured that queer sexual and gender identities continue to be marginalized in the imaginings of this region. In spite of the fact that queer and “Africanness” fail to play well together in the Maghreb, as is the case in other parts of Africa and the African diaspora, Macharia reminds us that “they often inhabit the same spaces, and even the same bodies, in uncomfortable ways,” in such a manner that it is important “to foreground their ongoing rubbing, leading, at times to pleasure, and, at other times, to irritation, and even possibly to pain” (5). I have been thinking, for some time now, how can these queer ghosts be exorcized from the psyche of the Maghreb, or at the very least communicated with and understood?

Even though he doesn't discuss the Maghreb, Macharia's reflection on frottage as a method that facilitates how to “process lost legibilities while trying to create new ones” (27) is resonant with current developments in the Maghreb, which finds itself in a defining moment. Rendering visible and legible the silenced and marginalized queer subjectivities demands deciphering the faint traces produced by lingering over and tracing through the erasures of queer narratives and lived experiences. In reading queer sexuality and desire in Frantz Fanon's work, Macharia finds that this is an unsettling process in which there is a present risk of “being left undone, unsatisfied, wanting more, and frightened” (32). In the case of the Maghreb, the lack of satisfaction emanates from the sporadic and scattered appearances of the figure of the queer in cultural imaginations. The process is also frightening because of the way in which the figure of the queer elicits discomfort and unease, owing to its embodiment of difference and defiance.

I have found frottage to be a productive and rich way of thinking through “the queer ghosts that haunt” the Maghreb by considering the skin, in literary and filmic products, as what Steven Connor terms an “expressive screen.”Footnote ⁴ This expressive screen that is the skin is embedded with diverse traces of queer narratives and bodily histories. The skin, I find, holds a trace of what queer subjects “might have desired, the forms of livability they imagined and invented that pursue freedom” (3). In this reading of the skin in Maghrebian cultural imaginings, I am interested especially by the French verb frotter, from which the term “frottage” originates. The verb frotter can mean “to rub,” “to scrape” or “to scrub.” By rubbing the skin, itself a sensual surface, it is possible to uncover and discover different forms of embodied subjectivities whose legibility and visibility had been previously disfigured and almost erased. Using the artistic method of frottage, of rubbing ink and paint on the canvas that is the skin, enables a navigation of the perfidious process of making legible and knowable not what is evidently visible but that which lingers in the dark and murky spaces of the unrepresented and unspoken.

The corpus of creative work, literary and filmic, that I engage with on/from the Maghreb, is involved in the process of provoking discomfort and uneasiness by centering on queer protagonists. The autofictional literary work of Abdellah Taïa, the first Moroccan writer to come out through his novels, stands out in the way in which it creates a veritable archive of queer Arab Muslim experiences. Taïa's literary work speaks to what Macharia calls the “active role of desire in political imagination and political action” (47). A collection of essays edited by Ralph Heyndels and Amine Zidouh focusses on this idea of the poetics and politics of engaged desire in Taïa's works.Footnote ⁵ Such engaged desire, as Macharia argues, “produces imaginations of the world, which, in turn, fuels political demands dedicated to building worlds in which queers can be possible” (51). The work of Taïa and other writers such as Rachid O., Hicham Tahir and Nina Bouraoui, as well as works by filmmakers like Raja Amari, Nadir Mocknèche and Nadia El Fani, has been important in offering new conceptualizations of how queer desire and pleasure are configured in the Maghreb.

The process of lingering and tracing over diverse queer narratives demands an interrogation of race, genealogies and kinships. Macharia explains often in Frottage that there is a need to forge “queer genealogies of intimacy [that] create powerful paradigms for creating dense, rewarding networks of association and affiliation, spaces and practices where queer diasporic radicals can belong” (163). In the case of the Maghreb, such an attempt at tracking queer genealogies demands a critical engagement with archives of nonnormativity in the Arab world as well as the often orientalist Western imagining of Arab bodies and sexualities. There is, indeed, a rich archive of queer figures in cultural products from the Arab world that date back to the Islamic Golden Age in folktale compilations in Arabic such as One Thousand and One Nights. At the same time, the Maghreb has been imagined in the West as a space inclined to eroticism, often exotic, and to homoerotic practices. Literary works of some of the leading French authors like Henry de Montherlant, Gustave Flaubert, André Gide and Jean Genet offered exoticized images of Arab bodies and sexualities. In figuring and tracking queer genealogies and kinships in the Maghreb it is imperative, I have found, to unthink the monolithic and reductive opposition between Western hedonistic fantasies and Islamic traditions that have vilified nonnormative gender and sexual expressions. I posit in my book La sexualité queer au Maghreb à travers la littérature that there is need to recognize the reciprocal and productive influences between cultures and belief systems from both sides of the Mediterranean.Footnote ⁶ These trans-Mediterranean genealogies focus mainly on normative familial kinships. Macharia explains that normative familial genealogies are important in articulating “allowable and taboo sexual proximities” (10). He further explains that “to write with the ‘family signature’ is to produce and reproduce, to affirm, always, the hetero-temporalities that connect the ancestors to the future” (11). Macharia demonstrates elsewhere that such focus on hetero-temporalities and hetero-kinships has placed heterosexuality at the core of the diasporic experience, in so doing strategically excluding queers.Footnote ⁷

In light of these ideas, queer sexuality in the Maghreb marks a conflicted point of convergence, the place where a “not-so-black-blackness” is compelled to consider and self-introspect about its Africanness. This involves tracing back the genealogies and kinships which have led the queer Arab subject in the Maghreb to be object and to have been easily disregarded. Of course, in thinking of genealogies and kinships, it is important for queer Maghreb to forge solidarities beyond the sub/Saharan divide which has tended to isolate the Maghreb from the rest of the continent. Macharia explains in a previous article the importance of imagining how different people “across multiple geohistories have co-imagined each other and attempted to create a shareable world.”Footnote ⁸ It is, however, clear that the Maghreb has forged sustainable geohistories and solidarities with the Arab-speaking world and with French-speaking Western countries (France, Switzerland, Belgium). A recent example can be seen in the online platform Alfamuna, which curates and archives queer-themed films from the Arab-speaking world. These films are available to stream only in countries from North Africa and the Middle East. Interracial tensions, further complicated by linguistic and religious borders, have, of course, undermined the full stretch of such solidarities with sub-Saharan Africa.

Frottage is a viable model, critical praxis and method that allows for the framing of visibility and legibility. Frottage makes visible what has been rendered illegible by normativizing power structures. However, through rubbing against the skin of the illegible, it is possible to uncover traces which can be weaved together to create coherent narratives of what it means to be queer in the Maghreb. The act of uncovering these traces demands a reading and analytical practice that is attentive to the particular ways in which the queer subjects challenge the lack of traces that characterizes how queer experiences are reduced to thinghood. Such challenging of erasure is important in uncovering and discovering new and transformative knowledge economies of “African gendering practices and the social legibility they confer” (26).

When Professor Grace Musila suggested holding a forum on Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora, I was deeply humbled by her generosity. Let me begin, then, by thanking her for the idea, for soliciting readers, and for modeling how to be in intellectual community. As a student, I read forums such as this one to learn how scholars engaged with each other, and I hope to follow the best examples of that work. Also, if I may, it is surreal to have my work be part of such a forum. I am deeply grateful to Dr. Gibson Ncube and Dr. Khwezi Mkhize for their intellectual generosity. In reading them, I have found my geohistories expanded and my thinking enriched. I am especially grateful to have Africa-based scholars engage Frottage. Ncube and Mkhize return Frottage to Africa, not only through their respective locations in Zimbabwe and South Africa, but also through demonstrating how the book helps them engage the Maghreb and South Africa.

Frottage started with a simple question: what if queer studies could start with the black diaspora? Work by Hortense Spillers, Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, and Katherine McKittrick had taught me that the black person does not enter colonial modernity in the same way as the white person. Dominant frames in queer studies that focussed on criminalization and medicalization could not account for the black person, who was not a subject in the same way as the white person. I hoped to think about how the blackness created by the rupture of colonial modernity stretched across the Americas and Africa, and how gender, sex, sexuality, and intimacy were crucial to figuring that blackness. Also, I was interested in how African and Afro-diasporic relations could be theorized without relying on the dominant metaphors of kinship in black diaspora studies and African studies. Could erotic practices provide other metaphors and methods? Frottage names one metaphor and method for thinking about African and Afro-diasporic relations that highlights difference and erotics.

Dr. Ncube extends Frottage's method to think with the Maghreb, a “liminal space” that “fails to fit easily into the Arab world because of its particular history as a French colony.” Neither quite Arab enough nor quite French enough, the Maghreb is also strongly marked by Islam, ensuring that “queer sexual and gender identities continue to be marginalized in the imaginings of this region.” How, then, asks Ncube, does one render “visible and legible the silenced and marginalized queer subjectivities” of such a region? As I read Ncube's thoughtful meditation, I am intrigued by how different formulations rub against each other: French colony and Arab world; political history and religious practices, particularly Islam; sub-Saharan Africa and the French-speaking world. History, language, politics, region, and religion do more than form subjects and places, as Ncube points out. They leave “traces” and “ghosts,” gaps and crevices in which queer figures might be formed, abandoned, harmed, eroticized, rescued, or some combination of all these.

I learn from Ncube's insight that “queer sexuality in the Maghreb marks a conflicted point of convergence, the place where a ‘not-so-black-blackness’ is compelled to consider and self-introspect about its Africanness.” This rub between “Africanness” and “not-so-black-blackness” resonates with a broader problem across Africa and Afro-diaspora: different claims for belonging are assessed by their proximity to or distance from various iterations of blackness and Africanness. I wonder if this particular rub between Africanness and blackness might be useful for those who take their Africanness as granted, and provide a place from which to imagine more capacious ways of practicing Africanness. Simultaneously, Ncube writes, “it is important for queer Maghreb to forge solidarities beyond the sub/Saharan divide which has tended to isolate the Maghreb from the rest of the continent.” I wonder whether frottage as method might name one way to imagine how such solidarities might emerge and function, and how the erotic might facilitate such an endeavor.

One such scene of friction – and frottage – emerges as I move from Ncube's Maghreb to Mkhize's South Africa. How might the Maghreb and South Africa rub against each other?

Mkhize approaches Frottage through the urban ruptures of colonial modernity found in a brief moment in Peter Abrahams's Return to Goli. At the heart of Mkhize's approach are two questions: how does travel across space – from the rural to the urban in this case – transform intimate practices and desires? And how do such transformations of practices and desires affect moral and epistemological frames? This latter question is encapsulated in the question Abrahams's character poses: “What is natural, Dladla?” As Mkhize writes, “The experience of urban modernity for the migratory black male … pushes heterosexual norms beyond their limits as new homosocial and homoerotic socialities offer alternative forms” of relation. Yet, as he points out, these “new homosocial and homoerotic socialities” risk being overlooked and dismissed as insignificant because they happen so rarely, in “marginalia, those aspects of texts, encounters and experiences that appear to yield so little that we'd be wont to discard them.” Here, Mkhize's attention to “marginalia” resonates with Ncube's attention to ghosts and traces, places where queer lives may have passed through.

I especially appreciate Mkhize's attention to the afterlife of anticolonial nationalism. He writes, “If anticolonial nationalism, as a political and aesthetic project, pivoted around masculine encounters and antagonisms, Frottage offers a way to recuperate the plural sexual and gender countercurrents that were swept to the margins of the social as the rumblings of postcolonialism were beckoning from yonder.” It might be that paying attention to the “plural sexual and gender countercurrents,” “swept to the margins” by the promise of independence, could provide us with different strategies to reimagine social and political formations and practices, especially those now dominated by ideas of patriarchal fathers of the nation and the kinship practices that substitute for civic engagements. Those minoritized by dominant narratives, whether these come from the state or from popular culture or from dominant aesthetic practices or mainstream politics, have learned to look for ourselves in marginalia and to find safety, no matter how limited, in the margins. And if safety cannot be found there, perhaps the erotic can make survival feel less fraught.

Would it be presumptuous to reiterate my thanks to Dr. Ncube and Dr. Mkhize for engaging Frottage so generously and extending its method to different geohistories? If so, let me be presumptuous. I am enriched by their discussions and look forward to continuing engagement.