Imagining Freedom with Keguro Macharia’s Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora

Keguro Macharia’s Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora (2019) is consistent with what his readers have come to associate with his thought on the different platforms he inhabits. Across his blog, Gukira, his Twitter timeline and his scholarly writing is a consistent sense of curiosity, imagination, play, rigour, and commitment to widening the horizon of the possible. Macharia remains one of the most dexterously multi-lingual scholars I know; not in the usual sense of speaking multiple languages – though he does –, but in the sense of speaking multiple genres and code-switching between these so elegantly, as he toggles between bodies of ideas that on the surface seem inhospitable to each other. Who else can seat the opening formula for Kiswahili folklore –