Queering Settler Romance: The Reparative Eugenic Landscape in Nora Strange's Kenyan Novels

Here's the abstract of the earlier version of this chapter (details given above):

This chapter examines the production of settler sexuality in several of Nora Strange's novels, a set of sources that have been almost entirely ignored in histories of Kenyan colonialism. It explains the unique nature of settler colonialism in Kenya, a space where a relatively tiny white population sought to establish itself as the dominant political force in the colony. The chapter discusses the romance novel as an understudied eugenic text. The romance's intense focus on love and sexual coupling makes it a uniquely malleable genre for exploring concerns about sexual dysfunction and reproduction. The chapter analyses settler sexuality in several of Strange's novels, focusing particularly on how the landscape is envisioned as a curative for settler queerness. By putting the "overcivilized" settler back in touch with his/her innate sexuality, and by exposing him/her to the dangers of disease and wild animals, this reparative eugenic landscape opens the settler to sex and reproduction—thus ensuring the continuation of the settler state.

A chapter with the same name, by the same author, but with somewhat altered content, appears in Elizabeth W. Williams' Primitive Normativity: Race, Sexuality, and Temporality in Colonial Kenya (2024, Duke University Press). I have included links to both books in which this chapter appears.

Here's the abstract for the second version of the chapter:

In Primitive Normativity Elizabeth W. Williams traces the genealogy of a distinct narrative about African sexuality that British colonial authorities in Kenya used to justify their control over indigenous populations. She identifies a discourse of “primitive normativity” that suggested that Africans were too close to nature to develop sexual neuroses and practices such as hysteria, homosexuality, and prostitution that supposedly were common among Europeans. Primitive normativity framed Kenyan African sexuality as less sexually polluted than that of the more deviant populations of their colonizers. Williams shows that colonial officials and settlers used this narrative to further the goals of white supremacy by arguing that Africans’ sexuality was proof that Kenyan Africans must be protected from the forces of urbanization, Western-style education, and political participation, lest they be exposed to forms of civilized sexual deviance. Challenging the more familiar notion that Europeans universally viewed Africans as hypersexualized, Williams demonstrates how narratives of African sexual normativity rather than deviance reinforced ideas about the evolutionary backwardness of African peoples and their inability to govern themselves.