Through their analysis of the depictions in film and literature of masculinities in colonial, independent and post-independent Africa, the contributors open some key African texts to a more obviously politicized set of meanings.
Collectively, the essays provide space for rethinking current theory on gender and masculinity:
- how only some of the most popular theories in masculinity studies in the West hold true in African contexts;
- howWestern masculinities react with indigenous masculinities on the continent;
- how masculinity and femininity in Africa seem to reside more on a continuum of cultural practices than on absolutely opposite planes;
- andhow generation often functions as a more potent metaphor than gender.

Lahoucine Ouzgane is Associate Professor of English & Film Studies, University of Alberta, Canada.

Lahoucine Ouzgane

Introduction Part I MAN & NATION IN AFRICA - Lahoucine Ouzgane
The anxious phallus: the iconography of impotence in Quartier Mozart & Clando - Jane Bryce
The homoerotics of nationalism: white male-on-male rape & the 'Coloured' subject in Mark Behr's The Smell of Apples - Lindsey Michael Banco
'Wild men' & emergent masculinities in post-colonial Kenyan popular fiction - Tom Odhiambo
The anonymity of manhood: unmasking shadow selves in Assia Djebar's Ombre sultane - Najat Rahman
The rape continuum: masculinities in the works of Nawal El Saadawi & Tahar Ben Jelloun PART II ALTERNATIVE MASCULINITIES - Lahoucine Ouzgane
'Coming unstuck': masculine identities in post-independence Zimbabwean fiction - Patricia Alden
Imported alternatives: changing Shona masculinities in Flame & Yellow Card - Katrina Daly Thompson
Ngugi wa Thiong'o & the crisis of Kenyan masculinity - Andrew Hammond
Father Africa: counter-narratives of masculinity in Ousmane Sembene's Faat Kiné & Moolaadé - Tarshia L. Stanley
The eternal other: authority of deficit masculinity in Asian-African literature - Justus K. Siboe Makokha
Recent trends in the treatment of homosexualities in literature & film by African artists - Marc Epprecht
Re-membering the last king of Dahomey: postcolonial masculinities & diasporic desires - Wendy Knepper