Bodies Out of Place: Reading African Masculinities within Colonial and Western Academic Institutions

ABSTRACT: Western academic institutions and archives have long been the subject of sustained critique in African fiction. This article reads the representation of black masculinities within Eurocentric academic institutions and archives in African and African diasporic literature. Starting with the portrayal of African masculinities within colonial academic spaces and moving on to their placement in the Western university, I examine black masculinities' relationship and experiences of Eurocentric academic spaces and epistemes in a bid to understand the complex processes of transformation and construction of black masculinities alongside their placement and positionality within colonial and global modernity. While arguing about the out-of-placeness of these masculinities within Eurocentric academic institutions and epistemes, I examine how they corral the contours of black men's desires and aspirations into hegemonic structures and the ways in which these masculinities transform these spaces and archives to enunciate complex critical processes of disobedience, undoing, and self-making.