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Ramzi Salti relates homophobia and gender discrimination to the critique of colonialism, while Rabih Alameddine focuses on the predicament of AIDS victims and satirizes the sources of American Orientalism, the Bible and the Arabian Nights.

In 2013 Diriye Osman wrote Fairytales for Lost Children, a striking collection of short stories that follow queer Somali immigrants in Kenya and Britain. This chapter shows how Osman’s creates a radically queer migritude text through his complex philosophy of temporality, home, and freedom. It also examines instances of queer liberalism and liberal (in)tolerance of queerness in Somali writer Nurrudin Farah’s Hiding in Plain Sight (2014). Building on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Robert Reid-Pharr, and David Eng, this chapter argues that neoliberal globalization, nationalism, and the ways in which these forces necessarily manage or police movement cannot be disentangled from heteronationalist discourses and laws circumscribing sexuality, and that queer liberalism and liberal toleration of queerness both practice and promote intolerance.

This chapter extends the discussion of the interrelationship of gender and nation into an area rarely mentioned if not taboo in discourses both colonial and post-colonial, namely, the same-sex desire of women. By evoking women's unruly, erotic yearnings, the two prominent Zimbabwean writers Tsitsi Dangarembga and Yvonne Vera explore the libidinal energies that exceed, or leak out between the fractures of, the conservative post-colonial state. Queer sexuality, in point of fact, probably still constitutes what could best be termed a virtual non-presence, or at least a covert silencing, an ‘unsaying’, in post-colonial discourses generally and in African writing in particular. It is a surprising omission or occlusion considering that, since the 1960s, post-colonial theory and criticism have grown up in tandem with the emergence of a politics of identity and cultural difference, and are deeply informed by discourses of rights and of resistance to a variety of forms of oppression.

This chapter engages sexuality and social class in the Windrush migrant male experience. It suggests that Andrew Salkey was – but is rarely now – recognized as a crucial figure of the generation, sidelined, among other reasons for the sexual politics of his writing. The chapter gives an account of his understudied 1960 novel Escape to an Autumn Pavement, showing how, in it, the intersection of class, race, and, above all, sexuality raises issues that interfere with the heroic masculinity characteristic of the heterosexual nationalism purveyed by the more consecrated Windrush novels. In uncovering the ambivalent but powerful queer energies evoked by Salkey’s text, the chapter illustrates how literary accounts of the period have failed to engage with the more complicated, less overtly oppositional emotions expressed in literature portraying the experience of mid-century West Indian migration.

Chapter 5 argues that the origins of Vietnam’s critical and socialist realism were not founded in class politics, as scholars have thus far suggested, but rather in queer internationalism. As the erosion of the male literati gave way to a female literary public, post-mandarin intellectuals were drawn to André Gide’s idiosyncratic synthesis of same-sex politics with socialism and his belief in individual literary expression and national particularity. The chapter argues that Gide’s influence in Vietnam during the 1930s underwrites the emergence of socialist realism. These claims challenge the historiography of the Vietnamese anticolonial revolution and its privileging of class determinism, leading to one of the main tenets of this book: that the disruption of gender and sexual relations set off by the post-mandarin rupture proves to be one of the crucial factors in Vietnam’s literary and cultural production during the era of colonial modernity.

The first part of this biography describes Burroughs’s identity as a self-destructive young man, still uncertain about being a writer, and having just graduated from Harvard and keeping literary and intellectual company. After some trouble with illegal substances, he and Joan Vollmer flee to Mexico.

This is an maginative and riveting account of Burroughs’s formative experiences in Mexico, his fascination with Mexico City’s demimonde, his acquaintances and friendships there, and his contradictory attitudes toward the country and its culture. Burroughs explores the culture of Mexico and studies Aztec and Maya history half-heartedly, living contentedly with Joan and the children. The couple lives a self-destructive lifestyle, and tragedy strikes when Joan is shot by Burroughs accidentally. The section includes a piece by Burroughs himself, “My Most Unforgettable Character.”

For many South Africans, the present state of the nation is not the future imagined during the anti-apartheid struggle: that time is no time like this present. This chapter uses Nadine Gordimer’s last published novel, aptly titled No Time Like the Present (2012), which features characters who share this assessment, as the starting point for a discussion of the monograph’s principal analyses and key theoretical engagements. These include Walter Benjamin’s idea of Jetztzeit or ‘now-time’, Ernst Bloch’s idea of an ‘educated hope’, and similar recuperative engagements with stalled utopian impulses, principally in queer and feminist studies (Heather Love, Elizabeth Freeman, José Muñoz, Jane Elliott, Lauren Berlant) that bring temporality and affect into conversation, and postcolonial studies (David Scott) that engage with stalled revolutionary potential.

South African-born, Scottish-resident author Zoë Wicomb is a key postapartheid literary figure; her oeuvre complicates assumptions about locatedness, ethnicity, and cosmopolitanism. This chapter reads her novels—David’s Story (2000), Playing in the Light (2006), October (2014)—and select short fiction—in You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987) and The One That Got Away (2008); ‘In Search of Tommie’ (2010)—to consider how Wicomb stages text itself as a privileged space within which to hold open the promise of the ‘loose end’ (a recurring metaphor), exploring its potential to unravel older formations in the social fabric to suggest new narrative and relational threads. It argues that the prevalence of queer subjects in her fiction mirrors Wicomb’s formally ‘queer’ strategies, including meta- and intertextuality, which offer more than the textual equivalent of characters’ displacements or the author’s own restless transnationalism (here October’s debts to Marilynne Robinson’s novel Home are canvassed).

This chapter focuses on poetry’s frequent use of animals to explore the complexities of love. Animals feature in poems as objects of love, as lovers themselves, or in various other, more figurative, capacities. Although creatures of all kinds populate love poetry, birds are the most ubiquitous. The mating behaviors of birds, at once instinctive and highly patterned, offer a natural parallel to the combination of impulse and predetermined structure that characterizes both love and poetry. And while the same could be said of other animals, birds employ song as a key component of their courtship and so reflect the work of love poetry. A focus on birds and other animals also offers the poet scope to celebrate the role of sexual desire in love. Yet animals, in their mingled familiarity and alienness, ultimately appeal to love poets less as direct models than as signs of erotic uncertainty, queerness, and inconclusiveness.