The paper was presented in a session called "On Queer Time: Velocities and Temporalities in Contemporary French and Francophone Cultural Production."
On Nov. 11, Professor of English Rosemary Haskell presented “Queer Time in Fatou Diome’s Kétala: Delayed, Disrupted and Fugitive Life Stories” at a virtual meeting of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association.
This paper, presented in a session called “On Queer Time: Velocities and Temporalities in Contemporary French and Francophone Cultural Production,” argued that Diome’s 2006 novel “Kétala,” the story of queer lives struggling to unfold in a hostile Senegalese culture, depicts the deadly pressures exerted on individual lives by heteronormative timelines and illuminates the broader cultural implications of these delayed, disrupted and fugitive life stories.
Fatou Diome is the author of several novels, including “Le Ventre de l’Atlantique,” very successfully translated as “The Belly of the Atlantic,” two short-story collections, and two polemics against the French “far-right” political wing. Diome has lived in France since the early 1990s.