Audience
“We Have Never Been Queer: Contested Politics of Queer Humanitarianism in Neoliberal Ghana.”
Kwame Edwin Otu is a cultural anthropologist with varied interests, ranging from the politics of sexual, environmental, and technological citizenships, public health, and their intersections with shifting racial formations in neocolonial and neoliberal Africa and the African Diaspora. His first book monograph is entitled, Amphibious Subjects: Sasso and the Contested Politics of Queer Self-Making in Neoliberal Ghana , and published by the University of California Press. The book is an ethnography on queer self-fashioning among a community of self-identified effeminate men, known in local parlance as sasso. In the monograph, Kwame Edwin Otu draw on African philosophy, African/Black feminisms, and African and African Diasporic literature to explore how sasso navigate homophobia and the increased visibility of LGBT human rights politics in neoliberal Ghana.
His ongoing ethnographic project investigates the vitality of the queerness of waste in general, and electronic waste, in particular, focusing on a community of e-waste workers whose lives, he argues, archive the multitudinous afterlives of colonialism, slavery, and racial capitalism.