Contested Borders

Reviews / Votes

William Spurlin's Contested Borders: Queer Politics and Cultural Translation in Contemporary Francophone Writing from the Maghreb is a rigorously researched and critically incisive account of Franco-Maghrebi writing. Spurlin's intersectional analysis is equally attentive to geography, race, gender, sexuality, and language. Simultaneously invoking, departing from, and moving beyond the critical and creative archive of works from the region, the author's attention to new spaces of dissident sexualities leads to future directions for research in the area. Contested Borders is a must read for scholars in Postcolonial, Middle Eastern and North African, and Sexuality Studies. -- Kanika Batra, Texas Tech University, author of <i>Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities: Publics, Counterpublics, Human Rights</i> Written in Spurlin's usual deft style, Contested Borders surveys an impressive range of feminist and queer Maghrebian texts, part of the region's long tradition of writing about same-sex desire. The authors of these texts, living in between radically different languages, histories, and cultures, visit upon those uncomfortable with the globe's increasing
fragmentation the truths, triumphs, and fragilities of those living beyond essentialized Western categories and indigenous cultural taboos. -- Wendy Laura Belcher, Princeton University Contested Borders is timely and makes an immense contribution to our understanding of queer sexualities in the Maghreb and by extension in Africa. To date, this is the only monograph in English on the Maghreb that brings to our attention important questions of our time: life writing, sites of memory, translation, globalization, and queer theory. -- Naminata Diabate, Cornell University