History Book Club Presents Dr. Elizabeth Williams

About the book

Primitive Normativity: Race, Sexuality, and Temporality in Colonial Kenya

Duke University Press, Jan, 2024

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 which supposedly were common among Europeans. Primitive normativity framed Kenyan African sexuality as less 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.

About the hosts 

Elizabeth W. Williams

Elizabeth W. Williams is Assistant Professor of Gender & Women's Studies at University of Kentucky. She completed her PhD in history, with a minor in feminist studies, at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests include the history of race, gender, and sexuality; imperialism; post/de-colonial studies; and queer theory. Elizabeth has taught courses on a variety of topics, including the politics of sex scandals, the history of sexuality, and global GLBTQ identities. 

Jessica Namakkal

Jessica Namakkal is Associate Professor of the Practice of International Comparative Studies and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of International Comparative Studies. She is the author of Unsettling Utopia: The Making and Unmaking of French (Columbia University Press, 2021) and is currently working on two new projects, one on decolonizing cults and the other a history of sexuality, race-mixing, and colonialism in the 20th century.