Tracking Fictive Depictions of Interracial Relationships between Diasporic Indian Women and African Men in East African Literature
Abstract
In this paper, I explore what Stephanie Jones has called “this most taboo and threatening of sexual relationships” – that of an Indian woman and an East African man (185). The dearth of scholarship examining fictive depictions of this particular sexual and racial configuration in East African literature is quite remarkable. This is a questionable silence in light of the recurrent portrayals of sexual encounters between Indian women and African men in the Anglophone literature of East Africa.These little-studied narratives are important because they compel us to rethink the colonial binaries that dominate the investigations of interracial relationships within the locus of British empire studies. These sexual encounters and/or relationships refuse the binary of Miranda and Caliban or that of the white imperialist and his beleaguered female employee.