Coming of Age in the Queer Postcolonial World

Online

This project is an analysis of three works of queer, postcolonial literature: GraceLand by Chris Abani, The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi, and One Day I Will Write About This Place by Binyavanga Wainaina, as well as artifacts of contemporary Black American queer culture. All three works—Abani and Kureishi’s novels and Wainaina’s memoir—can be categorized as bildungsromane, coming-of-age narratives that trace the development of their protagonists and their introduction into the society and culture around them and the associated social codes and mores, functioning as a “novel of education.” This form is specifically European, and is thus associated with Western values and systems, including cisheteronormativity (cisgender, heterosexual identities as default). The bildung tradition offers a space for queer, postcolonial authors to complicate the ways in which gender and race are constructed and reified. The queer postcolonial coming-of-age novel utilizes and re-appropriates elements of dominant, globalized, heteronormative, imperialist American culture to create an aesthetically queer, postcolonial narrative. I utilize Judith Butler’s concept of performativity and Homi Bhabha’s ideas of mimicry to think through the ways in which these protagonists are taught gender and race. These novels also use camp and drag to play with these concepts and create space for their protagonists to live authentically in a world that has yet to reconcile their queerness with their postcolonial identities. Across the western academy, queer literature syllabi remain primarily white and European or American. Within postcolonial studies, queer literature occupies only a small part of the space. In recent years, in an increasingly globalized publishing industry, there has been a groundswell of queer, nonwhite authors. As literature becomes more intersectional, we must continue to explore the impact of the past and look to creating a better environment for these texts.