By Rafael de la Dehesa*
UUU
In a talk titled “Same-Sex Africa and the Fantasy of Global Participation” organized by the Center for the Study of Women and Society of the Graduate Center, City University of New York on November 11, 2010, Tavia Nyong’o, professor of Performance Studies at New York University, discussed the “fantasies of democratic participation” underlying recent efforts by activists in the Global North to promote LGBT rights in several East African nations. The introduction of a bill in the Ugandan parliament that would punish homosexuality with the death penalty captured headlines throughout the world, prompting considerable mobilization through social networking sites and other Web 2.0 technologies. For many casual observers in Europe and the United States, the controversy surrounding the proposal, introduced by MP David Bahati in October 2009, melded into an undifferentiated panorama of homophobia sweeping across East Africa. For Nyong’o, the mobilization inspired by the bill, however well-intentioned, provided a starting point for a critical interrogation of the contours of global LGBT and human rights activism as structured by neocolonial relations and new information technologies, technologies that rely precisely on their users’ casual observation.
“This Ugandan anti-gay law could easily lead to genocide,” tweets @RyanNewYork, encouraging on-line surfers to click on a link to a CNN story in which reporter David McKenzie interviews the editor of a Ugandan tabloid newspaper supportive of the bill and invites “Western viewers” to share his alarm. The tweet and CNN interview thus reiterate a common binary pitting universal human rights standards against claims to national sovereignty. As Nyong’o observed, several critical approaches could be brought to this sort of coverage. One of these might question the use of highly-charged language like “genocide” in the original tweet, correct various inaccuracies in the CNN account, and offer a more complete picture of the national and international political landscape that produced the bill, citing, for instance, linkages between its Ugandan promoters and the religious right in the United States. Another might take the critique a step further, stressing its echoes of longstanding civilizing discourses stereotyping sub-Saharan Africans as genocidal barbarians not quite ready for self-rule, narratives that have served historically to justify colonial and post-colonial domination.
Recognizing the importance of these critical lenses as “necessary supplements to any transnational project of resisting homophobia,” Nyong’o focused primarily on another dimension of the story, examining how the structures of new information technologies “lock in” certain forms of political engagement. Most importantly, he stressed how the activism encouraged through facebook, twitter, and other social networking sites relies on providing a “minimum of knowledge,” aimed largely at producing an affective response, in order to encourage a “maximum of participation” (i.e. a “worldwide outcry” against the Ugandan bill). Ambiguous and open-ended temporalities are thus needed to create a sense of urgency and an ongoing response, even as political contexts must be simplified to produce transnational identifications. More broadly, this turn in global activism, argued Nyong’o, is symptomatic of politics in a neoliberal age. Creating a fantasy of participation that collapses activism with consumption and contestation with user-generated content, it promotes what political scientist Jodi Dean has referred to as “imaginary identities,” floating on the circuits of “communicative capitalism,” deracinated from the material contexts they seek to transform. In this context, the growing dominance of human rights as a universal language all too often reinscribes the binary between civilization and barbarism noted above while “narrowing the history of violence” to one of “helpless victims” requiring protection from “their repressive culture or government.”
Nyong’o’s arguments undoubtedly raised important questions about the limits of on-line activism and the possibilities of global solidarity in combating homophobia. Less explored in the talk were the concrete operations of human rights work, particularly in Uganda and other African nations, as well as these activists’ linkages with counterparts abroad. These issues were raised in a very interesting exchange following the talk, when a representative of an international LGBT rights organization underscored that local activists in various countries generally request its help in disseminating information internationally. At the same time, the representative recounted that an effort by the group to send information to its email list without a call to action was met with complaints by recipients not to clutter their inboxes if there was nothing for them to do, an observation that in some sense grounded certain aspects of Nyong’o’s critique of virtual participation.
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* Professor of Sociology at the City University of New York (Staten Island Campus)