Kwame Edwin Otu ‘09M presented “Normative Collisions, Amphibious Evasions: Sassoi and the Contested Politics of Queer Self-making” at the Africa@OHIO Colloquium at Ohio University in March 2017.
His talk was sponsored by the African Studies Program, Office for Diversity and Inclusion Multicultural Center and Programs, Africa@OHIO, the Black Student Cultural Programming Board, and The Gladys W. & David H. Patton College of Education Dean’s Advisory Diversity Committee.
Next month he is a featured speaker at the UCLA Department of African American Studies’ Emancipation & Empire Series: Africa and the Project of Black Studies.
Otu is an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies.
He earned his B.A. in Sociology from the University of Ghana, M.A. in Sociology from the College of Arts and Sciences at Ohio University and his Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Syracuse University after successfully defending his dissertation titled: “Amphibious Subjects: Sassoi and the Contested Politics of Queer Self-Making in Neoliberal Ghana” in April 2016.
Otu’s research interests include African Anthropology; Race, Sex, and Gender; Theories of Antiblackness and Anticolonial Studies; Transnational LGBT Human Rights; Afro-Diaspora and Afrofuturism.
The study of race in postcolonial Africa is central to his work, as are critical inquiries about race in the African diaspora.
In addition to his academic work, Otu has collaborated with Akosua Adoma Owusu, the award-winning Ghanaian-American filmmaker, to produce the film, Reluctantly Queer. It premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival earlier this year and was featured as part of the New Director New Films series held under the auspices of the Film Society Lincoln Center and MoMA.
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