“Sexing African Time and Space”: the Fetish of the Colonial Gender

Abstract

This article examines how Alain Mabanckou uses sexual allegories in his novel Broken glass (2010) to express (neo)-colonial realities in which Africa is charmed by the West into assuming the role of the sexual subaltern. Mabanckou appears to reinvigorate the sexual allegories of rape and prostitution for expressing the penetrative tendencies of colonialism by affixing their connotations of exploitation to the harsh socio-economic and political realities of (neo)-colonialism, thus creating a motif which is termed in the article as the fetish of colonial gender. Its coalescent value might be of great interest in postcolonial studies since it reveals how neocolonialists ascribe the subaltern’s time and space with exploitable sex through the charm of global economy. The critical discussion is built on textual research methods and it highlights on the fabric that holds the neo-colonial relationship between the West and Africa