Paper short abstract:

This co-authored paper explores this historiographies of sexuality and urban history and uses an unlikely comparison between eighteenth-century Gorée, Senegal and mid-twentieth-century Libreville, Gabon to examine the themes of sexual and spatial geography of the colonial city.

Paper long abstract:

The latest scholarship on gender and cities seeks to integrate gender to examine the built environment and social relationships, but the focus in Africa is on postcolonial megacities. African sexuality is often presented as dangerous and illicit and interracial relationships as exoticized. But African women and men inhabited cities as political actors and affective beings, actively conceptualizing ideas about pleasure, desire, and aesthetics. This co-authored paper explores this historiography and an unlikely comparison between eighteenth-century Gorée and mid-twentieth-century Libreville to examine the themes of sexual and spatial geography of the colonial city.

With Gorée, Semley uses letters, colonial records, and images, to demonstrate how the political, economic, and cultural activities of influential women known as signares in the proved integral to nineteenth-century ideas about citizenship. On a small island where the signares' stone and thatched-roof houses encompassed French government buildings and homes, living and working spaces overlapped as they were marked by family networks, sexual liaisons, religious practices, economic production, cultural performance, and political intrigue. With Libreville, Jean-Baptiste uses oral histories and court records to map varied sexual encounters between 1929 and 1960 to reveal how historical actors tendered sex to negotiate emotional and physical fulfillment, social status, material wealth, and political power. Libreville provided new built environments in which men and women encountered each other in heterosexual space: the timber camp, the café, the market, the street, as well as farms in forested suburbs.

The authors seek to historicize and theorize sexuality in colonial urban Africa.