The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power: Pan-African Embodiment and Erotic Schemes of Empire (review)

The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power begins to unravel some of the intimate and fraught connections between Western notions of family, love, desire, sex, and gender—the erotics of empire—and colonialism in all its forms. Greg Thomas argues that the ideology of white supremacy dominates all aspects of the Western imaginary, including its erotics. He shows how the exploitation, erasure, demonization, commodification, denigration, rape, and torture of black bodies and the censorship of African epistemologies for the profit and pleasure of whites is not only characteristic of but necessary to the metastasis of grossly unequal power relations and material conditions that characterize the geopolitics of the modern empire. Finally, Thomas forcefully asserts that the Western academy, in its failure to produce an adequate framework for a sexual analysis of colonialism that is of use to black people, has been feckless—if not knowingly complicit with hegemonic regimes of thought.

Thomas supports and illustrates these arguments by closely reading a plethora of texts from a number of different disciplines. He brings together the work of black intellectuals in Africa, the US, and the Caribbean, highlighting the many points of intersection in the writing of a very diverse group of scholars and thinkers within and outside the academy, including Ifi Amadiume, Oyeronke Oyewumi, and Cheikh Anta Diop, and Walter Rodney, George Jackson, Assata Shakur, Audre Lord, Joseph Beam, Dhoruba Bin Wahad, and Claudia Jones. Some of this work will be new to and invaluable as a resource for students of African literature, history, and thought as well as for Pan-African scholars and anyone interested in the psychology of colonialism. The book's passionate critique of the academy is relevant to those in any discipline who aspire to a self-reflexive scholarly practice.

Demon builds on the work of Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth) by applying his ideas of the nature and function of the national elite, and their adoption of bourgeois values, to the sexual politics of the current era. He shows how a pathological white erotic discourse glorifies the nuclear family and imposes rigid binary divisions between "savage" and "civilized" sexualities and kinship norms as well as male and female, hetero- and homosexual identities. The erotic discourse of empire defines by lack and functions strategically to prove the entitlement of the white West and to divide Pan-African people from one another. Thomas argues, for example, that the naturalization of homophobia in the black middle class evinces their assimilationist aspirations. He juxtaposes the writings and a brief intellectual biography of E. Franklyn Frazier with the life and work of Frantz Fanon in order to facilitate this sexual analysis of the "lumpen bourgeoisie" that builds on the thought of both men. Chapter 4 offers an overview of Fanon's work, pointing out that the elision of black women from the early texts was redressed in A Dying Colonialism. Moreover, Thomas's close reading of The Wretched of the Earth highlights the erotic underpinnings of Fanon's famous description of the ecstasy of revolutionary violence that results from the release of long suppressed feelings of rage. Thomas reappraises, rearticulates, and contextualizes Fanon's thought in the present moment. Demon also builds on the equally important legacy of Edward Said by turning the Occidental eye against itself, returning empire's pathologizing gaze.¹ Thomas elaborates on and contributes to the work of Walter Rodney by showing how current Western critiques of sex, including feminism and the gay rights movement, attempt to repress Pan-African insurgency by demonizing black males and black nationalism and/or erasing African epistemologies from their theoretical frameworks and/or ignoring the neocolonial context in which their own struggles for liberation take place (see, e.g., How Europe Underdeveloped Africa). Demon acknowledges its intellectual debt to Sylvia Wynter, whose theory of the "dysselected other" is central to its own thesis (see "Unsettling the Coloniality"). Thomas examines sexual otherness in its racial, colonial, and class contexts, resulting...