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/ Forschung
Publication: "Embracing African Queer Life in Namibia and Angola in the Early Twentieth Century: Kurt Falk’s Colonial Archive and German Sexology"
This essay by Dag Henrichsen discusses the queer colonial archive of the German settler Kurt Falk who lived in Namibia and Angola in the early twentieth century. It reconstructs Falk’s unknown, elusive biography and critically analyzes the production of his 1920s articles on "homosexuality" and "same-sex life" among African men and women, which is situated within contexts of everyday colonial violence, racism, and intimate desires. In a broader context, this case study provides a succinct example of the coloniality of sexology’s knowledge production of African homosexualities.
Abstract
This essay discusses the queer colonial archive of the German settler Kurt Falk who lived in Namibia and Angola in the early twentieth century. It reconstructs Falk’s unknown, elusive biography and critically analyses the production of his 1920s articles on ‘homosexuality’ and ‘same-sex life’ amongst African men and women. His queer ethnography with African men as co-creators of his endeavours is situated within contexts of everyday colonial violence, racism, and intimate desires. It reveals a white settler embracing African homosexualities in search of an alternative and queer kinship. The analysis of his publications reflects numerous ‘textual politics’ of Falk and protagonists from the progressive sexology and sexual reform movement in Germany’s Weimar Republic, including editorial interventions. In a broader context, this case study provides a succinct example of the coloniality of sexology’s knowledge production of African homosexualities.
