Paper short abstract:

Recent Ugandan short stories set in urban spaces use the city as a metaphor that normalizes homosexuality as an alternative sexuality for the educated and cosmopolitan Ugandans contrary to their homophobic conservative and transitionally oriented compatriots

Paper long abstract:

The city has always been constructed as a recurrent motif in African literature in the works of foundational African writers. These writers deploy the city as double-edged metaphor. First, the city is portrayed as a metaphor for the diseased polity that corrupts the pristine African society as eloquently articulated in Alan Paton's Cry The Beloved Country. Second, the city allegorises modernity as persuasively presented in Ngugi wa Thiong'o Petals of Blood in which disillusioned city dwellers bring modern ideas such as education to Illmorog. In this paper, I take cognisance of the enduring treatment of the city as a spatial metaphor in African writing to argue that in recent Ugandan short stories the city — infused with modernist and universalist notions of agency, rights and choice — symbolises a space that gay sexuality can be normalised. I read "Pillar of Love," (Lamwaka 2012) "Jambula Tree" (Arac 2007) and "Picture Frame" (Paleo 2013) as texts that set their tales in the city in a manner that empowers the respective protagonists to not only explore their preferred sexuality, but also to suggest that unlike their rural compatriots, the cosmopolitan, educated, middle class Ugandan characters in urban spaces perceive homosexuality as an alternative normal form of sexuality. Therefore, these writers use the short story genre to produce and circulate alternative and standardizing images of homosexuality in the Ugandan public sphere.