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

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments For producing me, sustaining me, and empowering me to think critically and passionately, I thank my family and community at large. I recognize them ¤rst of all. I struggle to achieve a piece of the wisdom and intelligence of my aunts, to whom I have dedicated this ¤rst book. My peace of mind and body has always been indebted to the support provided by my sisterly and brotherly cousins,who number in the millions, such as Christine Branom, John and Karen Ramey, and Doris Brown, who gave me her old laptop computer before she passed on, and to whom this book is also dedicated. I thank my sister, Deidre Dunnington Davis, for my three little nephews, Quinton, Nicolas, and Isaac, who make me happy! They bring me joy, which inspires me further to do what needs to be done in this world. I am thankful to my whole family and my people everywhere , at all times. I found righteous intellectual kinship (in academia, of all places) when I met Carole Boyce Davies, who makes sure I come through. She is a model scholar, comrade, and friend. She is also my ideal audience, always. I am sure we will never leave the context we were a part of at SUNY-Binghamton behind. Our critical mass of students and faculty there when I was a graduate student were a vital part of my development. I shout them out, wherever they may be today, in the spirit of what we stood for then and, I hope, now. The in®uence of Sylvia Wynter on my thinking and writing has been profound and enabling. She makes joining what she often calls the intellectual struggle irresistible. I bene¤ted from the academic and institutional support of Judith P. Butler, Felipe Gutteriez, and Saidiya V. Hartman at UC-Berkeley, where Eliza Noh became my partner in crime. I thank them along with kindred spirits Janis A. Mayes and Babacar M’Bow, who push and spark and support me in the best of ways, against colonial-national limitations of all kinds. On that note, I must acknowledge my fellow travelers in the Coloniality Working Group (CWG), which was international in composition but based in Binghamton. It created a serious space for my work to be read and heard around the same time that I took great advantage of a fellowship awarded by the Carolina Postdoctoral Program at UNC-Chapel Hill. A sample of CWG scholarship is joined by a portion of the opening chapter of this book in “Coloniality’s Persistence,”a special issue of CR: The New Centennial Review 3:3 (Fall 2003). A mélange of portions of the third and fourth chapters here ¤rst appeared in Présence africaine 159 (1999). This “Cultural Review of the Black World”impressed me so much in all phases of my research: I was truly honored by this publication. My best wishes to Mme. Christiane Yandé Diop. Thanks to my students , past, present, and future, who touch me and make me appreciate all that is possible in our work together. Thanks to Africa Resource Center, especially for giving me the opportunity to publish the e-journal I founded and edit, Proud Flesh: New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness. Much love to Véronique Tadjo, for art. Thanks to Pan-Africa, and Black radical traditions. Thanks to our Ancestors. Thanks to our Ancestors. Thanks to our Ancestors. xiv Acknowledgments The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power ...