Fragmenting Contexts and Contextualizing Fragments

Abstract

Most of the contributions to this edited volume were first presented at the conference "Contexts of Gender in Africa" organized by the Nordic Africa Institute's Sexuality, Gender and Society in Africa research programme in February 2002. In themselves, many of the studies are interesting and well-written, and in some instances offer new lines of inquiry into ethnographic studies. Nonetheless. problems inevitably arise when these disparate works are grouped into such a broad volume. Signe Amfred makes it abundantly clear in her introduction that postmodem writing on sexuality in Africa involves a transformation not merely of cognitive boundaries, but also of the ways in which these boundaries are constituted in the first place. Lest one accuse this particular postmodem cnt1que of representation of indicating the end of meaning. Amfred assures us that the point of this volume, separated into. three parts, is to raise the possibility of different modalities of meaning, or "alternative lines of thinking" as she puts it. 1 However; as this review attempts to illustrate, the production of alternative ways of thinking about sexuality in Africa appears to be a rather fraught project. Rethinking Sexualities in Africa offers so much contextual diversity that we are left with barely enough commonality to think about